We give two new characterizations of (F_2-linear, smooth) locally testable error-correcting codes in terms of Cayley graphs over (F_2)^h
1. A locally testable code is equivalent to a Cayley graph over (F_2)^h whose set of generators is significantly larger than h and has no short linear
dependencies, but yields a shortest-path metric that embeds into l_1 with constant distortion. This extends and gives a converse to a result of Khot and Naor (2006), which showed that codes with large dual distance imply Cayley graphs that have no low-distortion embeddings into l_1.
2. A locally testable code is equivalent to a Cayley graph over (F_2)^h that has significantly more than h eigenvalues near 1, which have no short linear dependencies among them and which "explain" all of the large eigenvalues. This extends and gives a converse to a recent construction of Barak et al. (2012), which showed that locally testable codes imply Cayley graphs that are small-set expanders but have many large eigenvalues.
Joint work with Parikshit Gopalan and Yuan Zhou
Full paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.5158