The coarse geometry of Tsirelson's space and applications

Abstract: The main result of this article is a rigidity result pertaining to the spreading model structure for Banach spaces coarsely embeddable into Tsirelson's original space $T^*$. Every Banach space that is coarsely embeddable into $T^*$ must be reflexive and all its spreading models must be isomorphic to $c_0$. Several important consequences follow from our rigidity result. We obtain a coarse version of an influential theorem of Tsirelson: $T^*$ does not coarsely contain $c_0$ nor $\ell_p$ for $p\in[1,\infty)$. We show that there is no infinite dimensional Banach space that coarsely embeds into every infinite dimensional Banach space. In particular, we disprove the conjecture that the separable infinite dimensional Hilbert space coarsely embeds into every infinite dimensional Banach space. The rigidity result follows from a new concentration inequality for Lipschitz maps on the infinite Hamming graphs and taking values in $T^*$, and from the embeddability of the infinite Hamming graphs into Banach spaces that admit spreading models not isomorphic to $c_0$. Also, a purely metric characterization of finite dimensionality is obtained.