New High Dimensional Expanders from Covers

We present a new construction of high dimensional expanders based on covering spaces of simplicial complexes. High dimensional expanders (HDXs) are hypergraph analogues of expander graphs. They have many uses in theoretical computer science, but unfortunately only few constructions are known which have arbitrarily small local spectral expansion. We give a randomized algorithm that takes as input a high dimensional expander $X$ (satisfying some mild assumptions). It outputs a sub-complex $Y \subseteq X$ that is a high dimensional expander and has infinitely many simplicial covers. These covers form new families of bounded-degree high dimensional expanders. The sub-complex $Y$ inherits $X$'s underlying graph and its links are sparsifications of the links of $X$. When the size of the links of $X$ is $O(\log |X|)$, this algorithm can be made deterministic. Our algorithm is based on the groups and generating sets discovered by Lubotzky, Samuels and Vishne (2005), that were used to construct the first discovered high dimensional expanders. We show these groups give rise to many more ``randomized'' high dimensional expanders. In addition, our techniques also give a random sparsification algorithm for high dimensional expanders, that maintains its local spectral properties. This may be of independent interest

Coboundary and cosystolic expansion without dependence on dimension or degree

We give new bounds on the cosystolic expansion constants of several families of high dimensional expanders, and the known coboundary expansion constants of order complexes of homogeneous geometric lattices, including the spherical building of $SL_n(F_q)$. The improvement applies to the high dimensional expanders constructed by Lubotzky, Samuels and Vishne, and by Kaufman and Oppenheim. Our new expansion constants do not depend on the degree of the complex nor on its dimension, nor on the group of coefficients. This implies improved bounds on Gromov's topological overlap constant, and on Dinur and Meshulam's cover stability, which may have applications for agreement testing. In comparison, existing bounds decay exponentially with the ambient dimension (for spherical buildings) and in addition decay linearly with the degree (for all known bounded-degree high dimensional expanders). Our results are based on several new techniques: * We develop a new "color-restriction" technique which enables proving dimension-free expansion by restricting a multi-partite complex to small random subsets of its color classes. * We give a new "spectral" proof for Evra and Kaufman's local-to-global theorem, deriving better bounds and getting rid of the dependence on the degree. This theorem bounds the cosystolic expansion of a complex using coboundary expansion and spectral expansion of the links. * We derive absolute bounds on the coboundary expansion of the spherical building (and any order complex of a homogeneous geometric lattice) by constructing a novel family of very short cones

The duplicube graph -- a hybrid of structure and randomness

Connect two copies of a given graph $G$ by a perfect matching. What are the properties of the graphs obtained by recursively repeating this procedure? We show that this construction shares some of the structural properties of the hypercube, such as a simple routing scheme and small edge expansion. However, when the matchings are uniformly random, the resultant graph also has similarities with a random regular graph, including: a smaller diameter and better vertex expansion than the hypercube; a semicircle law for its eigenvalues; and no non-trivial automorphisms. We propose a simple deterministic matching which we believe could provide a derandomization.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figures. Comments welcome

Boolean functions on high-dimensional expanders

We initiate the study of Boolean function analysis on high-dimensional expanders. We give a random-walk based definition of high-dimensional expansion, which coincides with the earlier definition in terms of two-sided link expanders. Using this definition, we describe an analog of the Fourier expansion and the Fourier levels of the Boolean hypercube for simplicial complexes. Our analog is a decomposition into approximate eigenspaces of random walks associated with the simplicial complexes. Our random-walk definition and the decomposition have the additional advantage that they extend to the more general setting of posets, encompassing both high-dimensional expanders and the Grassmann poset, which appears in recent work on the unique games conjecture. We then use this decomposition to extend the Friedgut-Kalai-Naor theorem to high-dimensional expanders. Our results demonstrate that a constant-degree high-dimensional expander can sometimes serve as a sparse model for the Boolean slice or hypercube, and quite possibly additional results from Boolean function analysis can be carried over to this sparse model. Therefore, this model can be viewed as a derandomization of the Boolean slice, containing only $|X(k-1)|=O(n)$ points in contrast to $\binom{n}{k}$ points in the $(k)$-slice (which consists of all $n$-bit strings with exactly $k$ ones).Comment: 48 pages, Extended version of the prior submission, with more details of expanding posets (eposets

Boolean Function Analysis on High-Dimensional Expanders

We initiate the study of Boolean function analysis on high-dimensional expanders. We describe an analog of the Fourier expansion and of the Fourier levels on simplicial complexes, and generalize the FKN theorem to high-dimensional expanders. Our results demonstrate that a high-dimensional expanding complex X can sometimes serve as a sparse model for the Boolean slice or hypercube, and quite possibly additional results from Boolean function analysis can be carried over to this sparse model. Therefore, this model can be viewed as a derandomization of the Boolean slice, containing |X(k)|=O(n) points in comparison to binom{n}{k+1} points in the (k+1)-slice (which consists of all n-bit strings with exactly k+1 ones)