Cohomological approach to asymptotic dimension

We introduce the notion of asymptotic cohomology based on the bounded cohomology and define cohomological asymptotic dimension asdim _Z X of metric spaces. We show that it agrees with the asymptotic dimension asdim X when the later is finite. Then we use this fact to construct an example of a metric space X of bounded geometry with finite asymptotic dimension for which asdim(X × R) = asdim X. In particular, it follows for this example that the coarse asymptotic dimension defined by means of Roe’s coarse cohomology is strictly less than its asymptotic dimension.