QUANTITATIVE MEASURE EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN AMENABLE GROUPS

We initiate a quantitative study of measure equivalence (and orbit equivalence) between finitely generated groups, which extends the classical setting of L^p measure equivalence. In this paper, our main focus will be on amenable groups, for which we prove both rigidity and flexibility results. On the rigidity side, we prove a general monotonicity property satisfied by the isoperimetric profile, which implies in particular its invariance under L¹ measure equivalence. This yields explicit “lower bounds” on how integrable a measure coupling between two amenable groups can be. This result also has an unexpected application to geometric group theory: the isoperimetric profile turns out to be monotonous under coarse embedding between amenable groups. This has various applications, among which the existence of an uncountable family of 3-solvable groups which pairwise do not coarsely embed into one another. On the flexibility side, we construct explicit orbit equivalences between amenable groups with prescribed integrability conditions. Our main tool is a new notion of Følner tiling sequences. We show in a number of instances that the bounds derived from the isoperimetric profile are sharp up to a logarithmic factor. We also deduce from this study that two important quasiisometry invariants are not preserved under L¹ orbit equivalence: the asymptotic dimension and finite presentability.