This is an announcement for the paper "The Euclidean distortion of the lamplighter group" by Tim Austin, Assaf Naor, and Alain Valette. Abstract: We show that the cyclic lamplighter group $C_2 \bwr C_n$ embeds into Hilbert space with distortion ${\rm O}\left(\sqrt{\log n}\right)$. This matches the lower bound proved by Lee, Naor and Peres in~\cite{LeeNaoPer}, answering a question posed in that paper. Thus the Euclidean distortion of $C_2 \bwr C_n$ is $\Theta\left(\sqrt{\log n}\right)$. Our embedding is constructed explicitly in terms of the irreducible representations of the group. Since the optimal Euclidean embedding of a finite group can always be chosen to be equivariant, as shown by Aharoni, Maurey and Mityagin~\cite{AhaMauMit} and by Gromov (see~\cite{deCTesVal}), such representation-theoretic considerations suggest a general tool for obtaining upper and lower bounds on Euclidean embeddings of finite groups. Archive classification: math.MG math.FA Mathematics Subject Classification: 46B20, 54E40, 52C99 The source file(s), LAMP-official.bbl: 3624 bytes The paper may be downloaded from the archive by web browser from URL http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0705.4662 or http://arXiv.org/abs/0705.4662 or by email in unzipped form by transmitting an empty message with subject line uget 0705.4662 or in gzipped form by using subject line get 0705.4662 to: math@arXiv.org.