It is well known that in compact local Lipschitz neighborhood retracts in Euclidean space flat convergence for integer rectifiable currents amounts just to weak convergence. In the present paper we extend this result to integral currents in complete metric spaces admitting a local cone type inequality. These include in particular all Banach spaces as well as complete CAT(k)-spaces (metric spaces of curvature bounded above by k in the sense of Alexandrov). The main result can be used to prove the existence of minimal elements in a fixed Lipschitz homology class in compact metric spaces admitting local cone type inequalities or to conclude that integral currents which are weak limits of sequences of absolutely area minimizing integral currents are again absolutely area minimizing.
We prove under suitable hypotheses that convergence of integral varifolds implies convergence of associated mod 2 flat chains and subsequential convergence of associated integer-multiplicity rectifiable currents. The convergence results imply restrictions on the kinds of singularities that can occur in mean curvature flow.
In this work, we consider sequences of $C^2$ metrics which converge to a $C^2$ metric in $C^0$ sense. We show that if the scalar curvature of the sequence is almost non-negative in the integral sense, then the limiting metric has scalar curvature lower bound in point-wise sense.
We prove a curvature pinching result for the Ricci flow on asymptotically flat manifolds: if an asymptotically flat manifold of dimension $n\geq 3$ has scale-invariant integral norm of curvature sufficiently pinched relative to the inverse of its Sobolev constant, then the Ricci flow starting from this manifold exists for all positive times and converges to flat Euclidean space. In particular our result implies that the initial manifold must have been diffeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^n$.
We show that for a noncollapsing sequence of closed, connected, oriented Riemannian manifolds with Ricci curvature uniformly bounded from below and diameter uniformly bounded above, Gromov-Hausdorff convergence essentially agrees with intrinsic flat convergence.
In this note we define a distance between two pointed locally integral current spaces. We prove that a sequence of pointed locally integral current spaces converges with respect to this distance if and only if it converges in the sense of Lang-Wenger. This enables us to state the compactness theorem by Lang-Wenger for pointed locally integral current spaces in terms of a distance function.
We prove results on intrinsic flat convergence of points---a concept first explored by Sormani in \cite{Sormani-AA}. In particular, we discuss compatibility with Gromov-Hausdorff convergence of points---a concept first described by Gromov in \cite{Gromov-poly}. We apply these results to the problem of stability of the positive mass theorem in mathematical relativity. Specifically, we revisit the article \cite{HLS} on intrinsic flat stability for the case of graphical hypersurfaces of Euclidean space: We are able to fill in some details in the proofs of Theorems 1.4 and Lemma~5.1 of \cite{HLS} …
Recall that Federer-Fleming defined the notion of flat convergence of submanifolds of Euclidean space to solve the Plateau problem. Here we prove the upper semicontinuity of Neumann eigenvalues of the submanifolds when they converge in the flat sense without losing volume. With an additional condition on the boundaries of the submanifolds we prove the Dirichlet eigenvalues are semicontinuous as well. We show this additional boundary condition is necessary as well as the condition that the volumes converge to the volume of the limit submanifold. As an application of our theorems we see that the…
Recently, a new embedding/compactness theorem for integral currents in a sequence of metric spaces has been established by the second author. We present a version of this result for locally integral currents in a sequence of pointed metric spaces. To this end we introduce another variant of the Ambrosio--Kirchheim theory of currents in metric spaces, including currents with finite mass in bounded sets.
In this paper, we first apply an integral identity on Ricci solitons to prove that closed locally conformally flat gradient Ricci solitons are of constant sectional curvature. We then generalize this integral identity to complete noncompact gradient shrinking Ricci solitons, under the conditions that the Ricci curvature is bounded from below and the Riemannian curvature tensor has at most exponential growth. As a consequence of this identity, we classify complete locally conformally flat gradient shrinking Ricci solitons with Ricci curvature bounded from below.
We give global restrictions on the possible boundaries of compact, orientable, locally conformally flat manifolds of dimension $4k$ in terms of integrality of eta invariants.
We prove that, starting at an initial metric $g(0)=e^{2u_0}(dx^2+dy^2)$ on $\mathbb{R}^2$ with bounded scalar curvature and bounded $u_0$, the Ricci flow $\partial_t g(t)=-R_{g(t)}g(t)$ converges to a flat metric on $\mathbb{R}^2$.
A natural question in mathematical general relativity is how the ADM mass behaves as a functional on the space of asymptotically flat 3-manifolds of nonnegative scalar curvature. In previous results, lower semicontinuity has been established by the first-named author for pointed $C^2$ convergence, and more generally by both authors for pointed $C^0$ convergence (all in the Cheeger--Gromov sense). In this paper, we show this behavior persists for the much weaker notion of pointed Sormani--Wenger intrinsic flat ($\mathcal{F}$) volume convergence, under natural hypotheses. We consider smooth mani…
We propose a definition of genericity for singular flat planar 3-webs formed by integral curves of implicit ODEs and give a classification of generic singularities of such webs.
Motivated by spectral asymptotics for orbital integrals in a relative trace formula, we generalize a number of geometric properties of geodesics in the hyperbolic plane, to maximal flat submanifolds of symmetric spaces of non-compact type.
In this paper, we focus our study on the ends of a locally conformally flat complete manifold with finite total $Q$-curvature. We prove that for such a manifold, the integral of the $Q$-curvature equals an integral multiple of a dimensional constant $c_n$, where $c_n$ is the integral of the $Q$-curvature on the unit $n$-sphere. It provides further evidence that the $Q$-curvature on a locally conformally flat manifold controls geometry as the Gaussian curvature does in two dimension.
Inspired by the Gromov-Hausdorff distance, we define the intrinsic flat distance between oriented $m$ dimensional Riemannian manifolds with boundary by isometrically embedding the manifolds into a common metric space, measuring the flat distance between them and taking an infimum over all isometric embeddings and all common metric spaces. This is made rigorous by applying Ambrosio-Kirchheim's extension of Federer-Fleming's notion of integral currents to arbitrary metric spaces. We prove the intrinsic flat distance between two compact oriented Riemannian manifolds is zero iff they have an orien…
We study a conformal flow for compact Riemannian manifolds of dimension greater than two with boundary. Convergence to a scalar-flat metric with constant mean curvature on the boundary is established in dimensions up to seven, and in any dimensions if the manifold is spin or if it satisfies a generic condition.
In this paper we address the relationship between Gromov-Hausdorff limits and intrinsic flat limits of complete Riemannian manifolds. In \cite{SormaniWenger2010, SormaniWenger2011}, Sormani-Wenger show that for a sequence of Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature, a uniform upper bound on diameter, and non-collapsed volume, the intrinsic flat limit exists and agrees with the Gromov-Hausdorff limit. This can be viewed as a non-cancellation theorem showing that for such sequences, points don't cancel each other out in the limit. Here we prove a similar no-cancellation theorem, rep…
The Fine Structure of the Singular Set of Area-Minimizing Integral Currents III: Frequency 1 Flat Singular Points and $\mathcal{H}^{m-2}$-a.e. Uniqueness of Tangent Cones
The fine structure of the singular set of area-minimizing integral currents II: rectifiability of flat singular points with singularity degree larger than $1$
Herein we present open problems and survey examples and theorems concerning sequences of Riemannian manifolds with uniform lower bounds on scalar curvature and their limit spaces. Examples of Gromov and of Ilmanen which naturally ought to have certain limit spaces do not converge with respect to smooth or Gromov-Hausdorff convergence. Thus we focus here on the notion of Intrinsic Flat convergence, developed jointly with Wenger. This notion has been applied successfully to study sequences that arise in General Relativity. Gromov has suggested it should be applied in other settings as well. We f…
We use the theory of rectifiable metric spaces to define a Dirichlet energy of Lipschitz functions defined on the support of integral currents. This energy is obtained by integration of the square of the norm of the tangential derivative, or equivalently of the approximate local dilatation, of the Lipschitz functions. We define min-max values based on the normalized energy and show that when integral current spaces converge in the intrinsic flat sense without loss of volume, the min-max values of the limit space are larger than or equal to the upper limit of the min-max values of the currents …
Currents represent generalized surfaces studied in geometric measure theory. They range from relatively tame integral currents representing oriented compact manifolds with boundary and integer multiplicities, to arbitrary elements of the dual space of differential forms. The flat norm provides a natural distance in the space of currents, and works by decomposing a $d$-dimensional current into $d$- and (the boundary of) $(d+1)$-dimensional pieces in an optimal way. Given an integral current, can we expect its flat norm decomposition to be integral as well? This is not known in general, except i…
We derive a gauge theoretic invariant of integral homology 3-spheres which counts gauge orbits of irreducible, perturbed flat SU(3) connections with sign given by spectral flow. To compensate for the dependence of this sum on perturbations, the invariant includes contributions from the reducible, perturbed flat orbits. Our formula for the correction term generalizes that given by Walker in his extension of Casson's SU(2) invariant to rational homology 3-spheres.
We study sequences of integral current spaces $(X_j,d_j,T_j)$ such that the integral current structure $T_j$ has weight $1$ and no boundary and, all $(X_j,d_j)$ are closed Alexandrov spaces with curvature uniformly bounded from below and diameter uniformly bounded from above. We prove that for such sequences either their limits collapse or the Gromov-Hausdorff and Sormani-Wenger Intrinsic Flat limits agree. The latter is done showing that the lower $n$ dimensional density of the mass measure at any regular point of the Gromov-Hausdorff limit space is positive by passing to a filling volume est…
