Stochastic approximation of lamplighter metrics

Abstract: We observe that embeddings into random metrics can be fruitfully used to study the $L_1$-embeddability of lamplighter graphs or groups, and more generally lamplighter metric spaces. Once this connection has been established, several new upper bound estimates on the $L_1$-distortion of lamplighter metrics follow from known related estimates about stochastic embeddings into dominating tree-metrics. For instance, every lamplighter metric on a $n$-point metric space embeds bi-Lipschitzly into $L_1$ with distortion $O(\log n)$. In particular, for every finite group $G$ the lamplighter group $H = \mathbb{Z}_2\wr G$ bi-Lipschitzly embeds into $L_1$ with distortion $O(\log\log|H|)$. In the case where the ground space in the lamplighter construction is a graph with some topological restrictions, better distortion estimates can be achieved. Finally, we discuss how a coarse embedding into $L_1$ of the lamplighter group over the $d$-dimensional infinite lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$ can be constructed from bi-Lipschitz embeddings of the lamplighter graphs over finite $d$-dimensional grids, and we include a remark on Lipschitz free spaces over finite metric spaces.