On the small scale nonlinear theory of operator spaces

We initiate the study of the small scale geometry of operator spaces. The authors have previously shown that a map between operator spaces which is completely coarse (that is, the sequence of its amplifications is equi-coarse) must be <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ℝ</mml:mi> </mml:math> -linear. We obtain a generalization of the aforementioned result to completely coarse maps defined on the unit ball of an operator space. By relaxing the condition to a small scale one, we prove that there are many non-linear examples of maps which are completely Lipschitz in small scale. We define a geometric parameter for homogeneous Hilbertian operator spaces which imposes restrictions on the existence of such maps.