Poincaré profiles of groups and spaces

Abstract: We introduce a spectrum of monotone coarse invariants for metric measure spaces called Poincar\'{e} profiles. The two extremes of this spectrum determine the growth of the space, and the separation profile as defined by Benjamini--Schramm--Tim\'{a}r. In this paper we focus on properties of the Poincar\'{e} profiles of groups with polynomial growth, and of hyperbolic spaces, where we deduce a connection between these profiles and conformal dimension. As applications, we use these invariants to show the non-existence of coarse embeddings in a variety of examples.