$\mathbb{Z}^2$ is flexibly stable in the operator norm

A cornerstone of stability theory is Voiculescu's 1983 counterexample: he constructed a sequence of pairs of unitary matrices whose commutators converge to zero in the operator norm, but whose distances from the set of commuting unitary pairs remain bounded away from zero. Namely, the group $\mathbb{Z}^2$ is not stable in the operator norm. We prove, somewhat surprisingly, that stability is restored after an asymptotically negligible enlargement of the dimension. That is, the group $\mathbb{Z}^2$ is flexibly stable in the operator norm. This provides the first example, in any context, of a flexibly stable group that is not stable.
Building on a construction of Eckhardt, who produced finitely generated amenable groups that are very-flexibly stable but not flexibly stable in the normalized Hilbert-Schmidt norm, we show that the same groups exhibit the analogous separation in the operator norm: they are very-flexibly stable but not flexibly stable.