On the structure of asymptotic expanders

In this paper, we study several analytic and graph-theoretic properties of asymptotic expanders. We show that asymptotic expanders can be characterised in terms of their uniform Roe algebra. Moreover, we use asymptotic expanders to provide uncountably many new counterexamples to the coarse Baum–Connes conjecture. Finally, we show that vertex-transitive asymptotic expanders are actually expanders. In particular, this gives a C⁎-algebraic characterisation of expanders for vertex-transitive graphs. We achieve these results by showing that a sequence of asymptotic expanders always admits a “uniform exhaustion by expanders”. This also implies that asymptotic expanders cannot be coarsely embedded into any Lp-space.