Measure doubling in unimodular locally compact groups and quotients

Abstract

We consider a (possibly discrete) unimodular locally compact group $G$ with Haar measure $\mu_G$, and a compact $A\subseteq G$ of positive measure with $\mu_G(A^2)\leq K\mu_G(A)$. Let $H$ be a closed normal subgroup of G and $\pi: G \rightarrow G/H$ be the quotient map. With the further assumption that $A= A^{-1}$, we show $$\mu_{G/H}(\pi A ^2) \leq K^2 \mu_{G/H}(\pi A).$$ We also demonstrate that $K^2$ cannot be replaced by $(1-\epsilon)K^2$ for any $\epsilon>0$. In the general case (without $A=A^{-1}$), we show $\mu_{G/H}(\pi A ^2) \leq K^3 \mu_{G/H}(\pi A)$, improving an earlier result by An, Jing, Zhang, and the third author. Moreover, we are able to extract a compact set $B\subseteq A$ with $\mu_G(B)> \mu_G(A)/2$ such that $ \mu_{G/H}(\pi B^2) < 2K \mu_{G/H}(\pi B)$.