Uniform non-amenability of free Burnside groups

The aim of this paper is to show that free Burnside groups of sufficiently large odd exponent are non-amenable in a certain strong sense. More precisely their left regular representations are isolated from the trivial representation uniformly on finite generating sets. It follows that free Burnside groups are of uniform exponential growth. This answers a question of de la Harpe. This work has been partially supported by the NSF grant DMS-0605093 and by the RFBR Grant # 05-01-00892. Received: 25 April 2006