Asymmetry of $\ell^{2}$-cohomology via skewed Følner geometry

Abstract

We study the two $\ell^{2}$-Dirichlet structures on a countable group $G$ arising from the left and right regular actions on $\mathbb{R}^{G}$. Although the two regular representations are unitarily equivalent, their $\ell^{2}$-Dirichlet subspaces of $\mathbb{R}^{G}$ need not coincide. Our main result gives a complete classification of this asymmetry for countable amenable groups: $$\mathcal{D}_{2}\left(G,λ\right)=\mathcal{D}_{2}\left(G,ρ\right)\quad\Longleftrightarrow\quad G \text{ is an FC-group}.$$ The proof is based on a skewed Følner-geometric mechanism, called a left scheme, combining summability of left boundaries with displacement under a right translation. We develop this mechanism generally, and demonstrate it concretely in the Heisenberg group and amenable wreath products over $\mathbb{Z}$. We also show that this mechanism has a dynamical counterpart in the theory of nonsingular Bernoulli shifts: every countable amenable group that is not an FC-group admits Bernoulli schemes whose left shift is nonsingular, conservative and weakly mixing, whereas the right shift by some element is singular.