Separation profiles, isoperimetry, growth and compression

Abstract: We give lower and upper bounds for the separation profile (introduced by Benjamini, Schramm & Tim\'ar) for various graphs using the isoperimetric profile, growth and Hilbertian compression. For graphs which have polynomial isoperimetry and growth, we show that the separation profile $\mathrm{Sep}(n)$ is also bounded by powers of $n$. For many amenable groups, we show a lower bound in $n/ \log(n)^a$ and, for any group which has a non-trivial compression exponent in an $L^p$-space, an upper bound in $n/ \log(n)^b$. We show that solvable groups of exponential growth cannot have a separation profile bounded above by a sublinear power function. In an appendix, we introduce the notion of local separation, with applications for percolation clusters of $ \mathbb{Z}^{d} $ and graphs which have polynomial isoperimetry and growth.