Characters of diagonal products and Hilbert-Schmidt stability

Abstract

We initiate a quantitative study of Hilbert-Schmidt stability for infinitely presented groups through the novel notion of stability radius growth. We exhibit an uncountable family of Hilbert-Schmidt stable amenable groups with arbitrarily large such growth. In particular, this answers a question of Lubotzky. Our approach is based on the character-theoretic stability criterion of Hadwin and Shulman. We classify the characters of alternating and elementary enrichments as well as diagonal products, including the classical family of B.H. Neumann groups.

arXiv comment42 pages; includes a table of contents; few minor corrections; accepted version to appear in the Transactions of the AMS