Warped cones, (non-)rigidity, and piecewise properties, with a joint appendix with Dawid Kielak

Abstract: We prove that if a quasi-isometry of warped cones is induced by a map between the base spaces of the cones, the actions must be conjugate by this map. The converse is false in general, conjugacy of actions is not sufficient for quasi-isometry of the respective warped cones. For a general quasi-isometry of warped cones, using the asymptotically faithful covering constructed in a previous work with Jianchao Wu, we deduce that the two groups are quasi-isometric after taking Cartesian products with suitable powers of the integers. Secondly, we characterise geometric properties of a group (coarse embeddability into Banach spaces, asymptotic dimension, property A) by properties of the warped cone over an action of this group. These results apply to arbitrary asymptotically faithful coverings, in particular to box spaces. As an application, we calculate the asymptotic dimension of a warped cone, improve bounds by Szab\'o, Wu, and Zacharias and by Bartels on the amenability dimension of actions of virtually nilpotent groups, and give a partial answer to a question of Willett about dynamic asymptotic dimension. In the appendix, we justify optimality of the aforementioned result on general quasi-isometries by showing that quasi-isometric warped cones need not come from quasi-isometric groups, contrary to the case of box spaces.