Subspace arrangements and property T

Abstract

We reformulate and extend the geometric method for proving the Kazhdan property T developed by Dymara and Januszkiewicz and used by Ershov and Jaikin. The main result says that a group $G$ generated by finite subgroups $G_i$ has property T if the group generated by each pair of subgroups has property T and sufficiently large Kazhdan constant. Essentially, the same result was proven by Dymara and Januszkiewicz; however our bound for “sufficiently large” is significantly better.

As an application of this result, we give exact bounds for the Kazhdan constants and the spectral gaps of the random walks on any finite Coxeter group with respect to the standard generating set, which generalizes a result of Bacher and de la Harpe.