Markov chains in smooth Banach spaces and Gromov hyperbolic metric spaces

A metric space X has Markov type 2, if for any reversible finite-state Markov chain {Zt} (with Z0 chosen according to the stationary distribution) and any map f from the state space to X, the distance Dt from f(Z0) to f(Zt) satisfies E(D t ) ≤ K tE(D 1) for some K = K(X) < ∞. This notion is due to K. Ball (1992), who showed its importance for the Lipschitz extension problem. However until now, only Hilbert space (and metric spaces which embed bi-Lipschitzly into it) were known to have Markov type 2. We show that every Banach space with modulus of smoothness of power type 2 (in particular, Lp for p > 2) has Markov type 2; this proves a conjecture of Ball. We also show that trees, hyperbolic groups and simply connected Riemannian manifolds of pinched negative curvature have Markov type 2. Our results are applied to settle several conjectures on Lipschitz extensions and embeddings. In particular, we answer a question posed by Johnson and Lindenstrauss in 1982, by showing that for 1 < q < 2 < p < ∞, any Lipschitz mapping from a subset of Lp to Lq has a Lipschitz extension defined on all of Lp.