Rigidity of warped cones and coarse geometry of expanders

We study the geometry of warped cones over free, minimal isometric group actions and related constructions of expander graphs. We prove a rigidity theorem for the coarse geometry of such warped cones: Namely, if a group has no abelian factors, then two such warped cones are quasi-isometric if and only if the actions are finite covers of conjugate actions. As a consequence, we produce continuous families of non-quasi-isometric expanders and superexpanders. The proof relies on the use of coarse topology for warped cones, such as a computation of their coarse fundamental groups.