In this short note we provide several conjectures on the regularity of measured Gromov-Hausdorff limit spaces of Riemannian manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded below, from the point of view of the synthetic treatment of lower bounds on Ricci curvature for metric measure spaces.
We prove that any weakly non-collapsed RCD space is actually non-collapsed, up to a renormalization of the measure. This confirms a conjecture raised by De Philippis and the second named author in full generality. One of the auxiliary results of independent interest that we obtain is about the link between the properties $\quad$- $\mathrm{tr}(\mathrm{Hess}f)=Δf$ on $U\subset\mathsf{X}$ for every $f$ sufficiently regular, $\quad$- $\mathfrak{m}=c\mathscr{H}^n$ on $U\subset\mathsf{X}$ for some $c>0$, where $U\subset \mathsf{X}$ is open and $\mathsf{X}$ is a - possibly collapsed - RCD space of es…
We show characterizations of non-collapsed compact $RCD(K, N)$ spaces, which in particular confirm a conjecture of De Philippis-Gigli on the implication from the weakly non-collapsed condition to the non-collapsed one in the compact case. The key idea is to give the explicit formula of the Laplacian associated to the pull-back Riemannian metric by embedding in $L^2$ via the heat kernel. This seems the first application of geometric flow to the study of RCD spaces.
The volume entropy of a compact metric measure space is known to be the exponential growth rate of the measure lifted to its universal cover at infinity. For a compact Riemannian $n$-manifold with a negative lower Ricci curvature bound and a upper diameter bound, it was known that it admits an almost maximal volume entropy if and only if it is diffeomorphic and Gromov-Hausdorff close to a hyperbolic space form. We prove the quantitative rigidity of almost maximal volume entropy for $\operatorname{RCD}$-spaces with a negative lower Ricci curvature bound and Riemannian manifolds with a negative …
We provide a general theory for parallel transport on non-collapsed ${\sf RCD}$ spaces obtaining both existence and uniqueness results. Our theory covers the case of geodesics and, more generally, of curves obtained via the flow of sufficiently regular time dependent vector fields: the price that we pay for this generality is that we cannot study parallel transport along a single such curve, but only along almost all of these (in a sense related to the notions of Sobolev vector calculus and Regular Lagrangian Flow in the nonsmooth setting). The class of ${\sf ncRCD}$ spaces contains finite dim…
We establish topological regularity and stability of N-dimensional RCD(K,N) spaces (up to a small singular set), also called non-collapsed RCD(K,N) in the literature. We also introduce the notion of a boundary of such spaces and study its properties, including its behavior under Gromov-Hausdorff convergence.
Given a metric measure space $(X,d,\mathfrak{m})$ that satisfies the Riemannian Curvature Dimension condition, $RCD^*(K,N),$ and a compact subgroup of isometries $G \leq Iso(X)$ we prove that there exists a $G-$invariant measure, $\mathfrak{m}_G,$ equivalent to $\mathfrak{m}$ such that $(X,d,\mathfrak{m}_G)$ is still a $RCD^*(K,N)$ space. We also obtain some applications to Lie group actions on $RCD^*(K,N)$ spaces. We look at homogeneous spaces, symmetric spaces and obtain dimensional gaps for closed subgroups of isometries.
We prove that if an RCD space has a regular isometric immersion in a Euclidean space, then the immersion is a locally bi-Lipschitz embedding map. This result leads us to prove that if a compact non-collapsed RCD space has an isometric immersion in a Euclidean space via an eigenmap, then the eigenmap is a locally bi-Lipschitz embedding map to a sphere, which generalizes a fundamental theorem of Takahashi in submanifold theory to a non-smooth setting. Applications of these results include a topological sphere theorem and topological finiteness theorems, which are new even for closed Riemannian m…
Let $(M,g)$ be a smooth Riemannian manifold and $\mathsf{G}$ a compact Lie group acting on $M$ effectively and by isometries. It is well known that a lower bound of the sectional curvature of $(M,g)$ is again a bound for the curvature of the quotient space, which is an Alexandrov space of curvature bounded below. Moreover, the analogous stability property holds for metric foliations and submersions. The goal of the paper is to prove the corresponding stability properties for synthetic Ricci curvature lower bounds. Specifically, we show that such stability holds for quotients of $\mathsf{RCD}^{…
We generalize to the ${\rm RCD}(0,N)$ setting a family of monotonicity formulas by Colding and Minicozzi for positive harmonic functions in Riemannian manifolds with non-negative Ricci curvature. Rigidity and almost rigidity statements are also proven, the second appearing to be new even in the smooth setting. Motivated by the recent work in [AFM] we also introduce the notion of electrostatic potential in ${\rm RCD}$ spaces, which also satisfies our monotonicity formulas. Our arguments are mainly based on new estimates for harmonic functions in ${\rm RCD}(K,N)$ spaces and on a new functional v…
In this paper, we will establish an elliptic local Li-Yau gradient estimate for weak solutions of the heat equation on metric measure spaces with generalized Ricci curvature bounded from below. One of its main applications is a sharp gradient estimate for the logarithm of heat kernels. These results seem new even for smooth Riemannian manifolds.
We prove an upper bound on the rank of the abelianised revised fundamental group (called "revised first Betti number") of a compact $RCD^{*}(K,N)$ space, in the same spirit of the celebrated Gromov-Gallot upper bound on the first Betti number for a smooth compact Riemannian manifold with Ricci curvature bounded below. When the synthetic lower Ricci bound is close enough to (negative) zero and the aforementioned upper bound on the revised first Betti number is saturated (i.e. equal to the integer part of $N$, denoted by $\lfloor N \rfloor$), then we establish a torus stability result stating th…
We study collapsed manifolds with Ricci bounded covering geometry i.e., Ricci curvature is bounded below and the Riemannian universal cover is non-collapsed or consists of uniform Reifenberg points. Via Ricci flows' techniques, we partially extend the nilpotent structural results of Cheeger-Fukaya-Gromov, on collapsed manifolds with (sectional curvature) local bounded covering geometry, to manifolds with (global) Ricci boundedcovering geometry.
We prove existence and uniqueness of optimal maps on $RCD^*(K,N)$ spaces under the assumption that the starting measure is absolutely continuous. We also discuss how this result naturally leads to the notion of exponentiation.
In this paper we prove that in the class of metric measure spaces with Alexandrov curvature bounded from below the Riemannian curvature-dimension condition $RCD(K,N)$ with $K\in \mathbb{R}$ and $N\in [1,\infty)$ is preserved under doubling and gluing constructions.
Since non-compact RCD(0, N) spaces have at least linear volume growth, we study noncompact RCD(0, N) spaces with linear volume growth in this paper. One of the main results is that the diameter of level sets of a Busemann function grow at most linearly on a noncompact RCD(0, N) space satisfying the linear volume growth condition. Another main result in this paper is a splitting theorem at the noncompact end for a RCD(0, N) space with strongly minimal volume growth. These results generalize some theorems on noncompact manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature to non-smooth settings.
Assuming a lower bound on the Ricci curvature of a complete Riemannian manifold, for $p< 1/2$ we show the existence of bounds on the local $L^p$ norm of the Ricci curvature that depend only on the dimension and which improve with volume collapse.
In this paper, we will prove the Weyl's law for the asymptotic formula of Dirichlet eigenvalues on metric measure spaces with generalized Ricci curvature bounded from below.
In the framework of (possibly non-smooth) metric measure spaces with Ricci curvature bounded below by a positive constant in a synthetic sense, we establish a sharp and rigid reverse-Hölder inequality for first eigenfunctions of the Dirichlet Laplacian. This generalises to the positively curved and non-smooth setting the classical "Chiti Comparison Theorem". We also prove a related quantitative stability result which seems to be new even for smooth Riemannian manifolds.
For $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifolds $M$ with Ricci curvature bounded below by $-(n-1)$, the volume entropy is bounded above by $n-1$. If $M$ is compact, it is known that the equality holds if and only if $M$ is hyperbolic. We extend this result to $\mathsf{RCD}^{\ast}(-(N-1),N)$ spaces. While the upper bound is straightforward, the rigidity case is quite involved due to the lack of a smooth structure in $\mathsf{RCD}^{\ast}$ spaces. As an application we obtain an almost rigidity result which partially recovers a result by Cheng-Rong-Xu for Riemannian manifolds.
We prove that for any complete three-manifold with a lower Ricci curvature bound and a lower bound on the volume of balls of radius one, a solution to the Ricci flow exists for short time. Actually our proof also yields a (non-canonical) way to flow and regularize some interior region of a non-complete initial data satisfying the aformentioned bounds.
We will study metric measure spaces $(X,d,m)$ beyond the scope of spaces with synthetic lower Ricci bounds. In particular, we introduce distribution-valued lower Ricci bounds BE$_1(κ,\infty)$ $\bullet$ for which we prove the equivalence with sharp gradient estimates, $\bullet$ the class of which will be preserved under time changes with arbitrary $ψ\in{\mathrm Lip}_b(X)$, and $\bullet$ which are satisfied for the Neumann Laplacian on arbitrary semi-convex subsets $Y\subset X$. In the latter case, the distribution-valued Ricci bound will be given by the signed measure $κ= k\, m_Y + \ell\,σ_{\pa…
Using techniques of optimal transportation and gradient flows in metric spaces, we extend the notion of Riemannian Curvature Dimension condition $RCD(K,\infty)$ introduced (in case the reference measure is finite) by Giuseppe Savare', the first and the second author, to the case the reference measure is $σ$-finite; in this way the theory includes natural examples as the euclidean $n$-dimensional space endowed with the Lebesgue measure, and noncompact manifolds with bounded geometry endowed with the Riemannian volume measure. Another major goal of the paper is to simplify the axiomatization of …
We prove a general existence theorem for collapsed ancient solutions to the Ricci flow on compact homogeneous spaces and we show that they converge in the Gromov-Hausdorff topology, under a suitable rescaling, to an Einstein metric on the base of a torus fibration. This construction generalizes all previous known examples in the literature.
We construct a family of non-collapsed, non-Kähler, non-Einstein steady Ricci solitons in even dimensions greater or equal to four. These solitons exist on complex line bundles over Kähler-Einstein manifolds of positive scalar curvature. They include a four-dimensional $U(2)$-invariant, non-collapsed Riemannian steady soliton on each of the line bundles $O(k)$, $k>2$ of $\mathbb{C}P^1$. Finally, we find Taub-Nut like Ricci solitons and demonstrate a new proof for the existence of the Bryant soliton.
The main goal of the paper is to prove the existence of the universal cover for $RCD^*(K,N)$-spaces. This generalizes earlier work of C. Sormani and the second named author on the existence of universal covers for Ricci limit spaces. As a result, we also obtain several structure results on the (revised) fundamental group of such spaces. These are the first topological results for $RCD^{*}(K,N)$-spaces without extra structural-topological assumptions (such as semi-local simple connectedness).
We consider compact noncollapsed ancient solutions to the 3-dimensional Ricci flow that are rotationally and reflection symmetric. We prove that these solutions are either the spheres or they all have unique asymptotic behavior as $t\to-\infty$ and we give their precise asymptotic description. This description applies in particular to the solution constructed by G.Perelman
This note is devoted to the study of sets of finite perimeter over RCD$(K,N)$ metric measure spaces. Its aim is to complete the picture about the generalization of De Giorgi's theorem within this framework. Starting from the results of [2] we obtain uniqueness of tangents and rectifiability for the reduced boundary of sets of finite perimeter. As an intermediate tool, of independent interest, we develop a Gauss-Green integration by parts formula tailored to this setting. These results are new and non-trivial even in the setting of Ricci limits.