Poincaré inequalities and rigidity for actions on Banach spaces

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to extend the framework of the spectral method for proving property (T) to the class of reflexive Banach spaces and present a condition implying that every affine isometric action of a given group $G$ on a reflexive Banach space $X$ has a fixed point. This last property is a strong version of Kazhdan's property (T) and is equivalent to the fact that $H^1(G,\pi)=0$ for every isometric representation $\pi$ of $G$ on $X$. The condition is expressed in terms of $p$-Poincar\'{e} constants and we provide examples of groups, which satisfy such conditions and for which $H^1(G,\pi)$ vanishes for every isometric representation $\pi$ on an $L_p$ space for some $p>2$. Our methods allow to estimate such a $p$ explicitly and yield several interesting applications. In particular, we obtain quantitative estimates for vanishing of 1-cohomology with coefficients in uniformly bounded representations on a Hilbert space. We also give lower bounds on the conformal dimension of the boundary of a hyperbolic group in the Gromov density model.