Measured asymptotic expanders and rigidity for Roe algebras

Abstract

Our main result about rigidity of Roe algebras is the following: if $X$ and $Y$ are metric spaces with bounded geometry such that their Roe algebras are $*$-isomorphic, then $X$ and $Y$ are coarsely equivalent provided that either $X$ or $Y$ contains no sparse subspaces consisting of ghostly measured asymptotic expanders. Note that this geometric condition generalises the existing technical assumptions used for rigidity of Roe algebras. Consequently, we show that the rigidity holds for all bounded geometry spaces which coarsely embed into some $L^p$-space for $p\in [1,\infty)$. Moreover, we also verify the rigidity for the box spaces constructed by Arzhantseva-Tessera and Delabie-Khukhro even though they do \emph{not} coarsely embed into any $L^p$-space. The key step towards our proof for the rigidity is to show that a block-rank-one (ghost) projection on a sparse space $X$ belongs to the Roe algebra $C^*(X)$ if and only if $X$ consists of (ghostly) measured asymptotic expanders. As a by-product, we also deduce that ghostly measured asymptotic expanders are new sources of counterexamples to the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture.