Poincaré profiles of Lie groups and a coarse geometric dichotomy

Abstract Poincaré profiles are analytically defined invariants, which provide obstructions to the existence of coarse embeddings between metric spaces. We calculate them for all connected unimodular Lie groups, Baumslag–Solitar groups and Thurston geometries, demonstrating two substantially different types of behaviour. For Lie groups, our dichotomy extends both the rank one versus higher rank dichotomy for semisimple Lie groups and the polynomial versus exponential growth dichotomy for solvable unimodular Lie groups. We provide equivalent algebraic, quasi-isometric and coarse geometric formulations of this dichotomy. As a consequence, we deduce that for groups of the form N S N × S, where N is a connected nilpotent Lie group, and S is a rank one simple Lie group, both the growth exponent of N, and the conformal dimension of S are non-decreasing under coarse embeddings. These results are new even for quasi-isometric embeddings and give obstructions which in many cases improve those previously obtained by Buyalo–Schroeder.