An isoperimetric inequality for Hamming balls and local expansion in hypercubes

Abstract

We prove a vertex isoperimetric inequality for the $n$-dimensional Hamming ball $\mathcal{B}_n(R)$ of radius $R$. The isoperimetric inequality is sharp up to a constant factor for sets that are comparable to $\mathcal{B}_n(R)$ in size. A key step in the proof is a local expansion phenomenon in hypercubes.