Sparser Abelian High Dimensional Expanders

TL;DR

This paper introduces two explicit constructions of high dimensional expanders over abelian groups, improving degrees and providing the first known coboundary expander, using linear algebra, combinatorics, and novel algebraic structures.

Contribution

It presents new explicit constructions of Cayley high dimensional expanders with improved parameters and introduces the first coboundary expander based on the Johnson scheme.

Findings

Construction of local spectral HDXs with subpolynomial degree

First known 2-dimensional HDXs that are both spectral and coboundary expanders

Identification of a common structure resembling Hadamard code intersections

Abstract

We present two new explicit constructions of Cayley high dimensional expanders (HDXs) over the abelian group $\mathbb{F}_2^n$. Our expansion proofs use only linear algebra and combinatorial arguments. The first construction gives local spectral HDXs of any constant dimension and subpolynomial degree $\exp(n^\epsilon)$ for every $\epsilon >0$, improving on a construction by Golowich [Gol23] which achieves $\epsilon =1/2$. [Gol23] derives these HDXs by sparsifying the complete Grassmann poset of subspaces. The novelty in our construction is the ability to sparsify any expanding Grassmannian posets, leading to iterated sparsification and much smaller degrees. The sparse Grassmannian (which is of independent interest in the theory of HDXs) serves as the generating set of the Cayley graph. Our second construction gives a 2-dimensional HDXs of any polynomial degree $\exp(\epsilon n$) for any constant $\epsilon > 0$, which is simultaneously a spectral expander and a coboundary expander. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such non-trivial construction. We name it the Johnson complex, as it is derived from the classical Johnson scheme, whose vertices serve as the generating set of this Cayley graph. This construction may be viewed as a derandomization of the recent random geometric complexes of [LMSY23]. Establishing coboundary expansion through Gromov's "cone method" and the associated isoperimetric inequalities is the most intricate aspect of this construction. While these two constructions are quite different, we show that they both share a common structure, resembling the intersection patterns of vectors in the Hadamard code. We propose a general framework of such "Hadamard-like" constructions in the hope that it will yield new HDXs.