Sharp H\"older continuity of tangent cones for spaces with a lower Ricci curvature bound and applications

We prove a new kind of estimate that holds on any manifold with lower Ricci bounds. It relates the geometry of two small balls with the same radius, potentially far apart, but centered in the interior of a common minimizing geodesic. It reveals new, previously unknown, properties that all generalized spaces with a lower Ricci curvature bound must have and it has a number of applications. This new kind of estimate asserts that the geometry of small balls along any minimizing geodesic changes in a H\"older continuous way with a constant depending on the lower bound for the Ricci curvature, the dimension of the manifold, and the distance to the end points of the geodesic. We give examples that show that the H\"older exponent, along with essentially all the other consequences that we show follow from this estimate, are sharp. The unified theme for all of these applications is convexity. Among the applications is that the regular set is convex for any non-collapsed limit of Einstein metrics. In the general case of potentially collapsed limits of manifolds with just a lower Ricci curvature bound we show that the regular set is weakly convex and $a.e.$ convex, that is almost every pair of points can be connected by a minimizing geodesic whose interior is contained in the regular set. We also show two conjectures of Cheeger-Colding. One of these asserts that the isometry group of any, even collapsed, limit of manifolds with a uniform lower Ricci curvature bound is a Lie group; the key point for this is to rule out small subgroups. The other asserts that the dimension of any limit space is the same everywhere. Finally, we show that a Reifenberg type property holds for collapsed limits and discuss why this indicate further regularity of manifolds and spaces with Ricci curvature bounds.Comment: 48 page

Inverse limit spaces satisfying a Poincare inequality

We give conditions on Gromov-Hausdorff convergent inverse systems of metric measure graphs (and certain higher dimensional inverse systems of metric measure spaces) which imply that the measured Gromov-Hausdorff limit (equivalently, the inverse limit) is a PI space, i.e. it satisfies a doubling condition and a Poincare inequality in the sense of Heinonen-Koskela. We also give a systematic construction of examples for which our conditions are satisfied. Included are known examples of PI spaces, such as Laakso spaces, and a large class of new examples. Generically our graph examples have the property that they do not bilipschitz embed in any Banach space with Radon-Nikodym property, but they do embed in the Banach space L_1. For Laakso spaces, these facts were discussed in our earlier papers

Characterization of the Radon-Nikodym Property in terms of inverse limits

We clarify the relation between inverse systems, the Radon-Nikodym property, the Asymptotic Norming Property of James-Ho, and the GFDA spaces introduced in our earlier paper on differentiability of Lipschitz maps into Banach spaces

Regularity of Einstein Manifolds and the Codimension 4 Conjecture

In this paper, we are concerned with the regularity of noncollapsed Riemannian manifolds $(M^n,g)$ with bounded Ricci curvature, as well as their Gromov-Hausdorff limit spaces $(M^n_j,d_j)\stackrel{d_{GH}}{\longrightarrow} (X,d)$, where $d_j$ denotes the Riemannian distance. Our main result is a solution to the codimension $4$ conjecture, namely that $X$ is smooth away from a closed subset of codimension $4$. We combine this result with the ideas of quantitative stratification to prove a priori $L^q$ estimates on the full curvature $|Rm|$ for all $q<2$. In the case of Einstein manifolds, we improve this to estimates on the regularity scale. We apply this to prove a conjecture of Anderson that the collection of $4$-manifolds $(M^4,g)$ with $|Ric_{M^4}|\leq 3$, $Vol(M)>v>0$, and $diam(M)\leq D$ contains at most a finite number of diffeomorphism classes. A local version of this is used to show that noncollapsed $4$-manifolds with bounded Ricci curvature have a priori $L^2$ Riemannian curvature estimates.Comment: Estimates in Theorem 1.9 shown to hold in the distribution sense; so interpreted in Definition 1.1

A weakly second order differential structure on rectifiable metric measure spaces

We give the definition of angles on a Gromov-Hausdorff limit space of a sequence of complete n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds with a lower Ricci curvature bound. We apply this to prove there is a weakly second order differential structure on these spaces and prove there is a unique Levi-Civita connection allowing us to define the Hessian of a twice differentiable function.Comment: 29 pages. Several statements added. The title change

Compression bounds for Lipschitz maps from the Heisenberg group to L1L_1

We prove a quantitative bi-Lipschitz nonembedding theorem for the Heisenberg group with its Carnot-Carath\'eodory metric and apply it to give a lower bound on the integrality gap of the Goemans-Linial semidefinite relaxation of the Sparsest Cut problem

Precompactness of solutions to the Ricci flow in the absence of injectivity radius estimates

Consider a sequence of pointed n-dimensional complete Riemannian manifolds {(M_i,g_i(t), O_i)} such that t in [0,T] are solutions to the Ricci flow and g_i(t) have uniformly bounded curvatures and derivatives of curvatures. Richard Hamilton showed that if the initial injectivity radii are uniformly bounded below then there is a subsequence which converges to an n-dimensional solution to the Ricci flow. We prove a generalization of this theorem where the initial metrics may collapse. Without injectivity radius bounds we must allow for convergence in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense to a space which is not a manifold but only a metric space. We then look at the local geometry of the limit to understand how it relates to the Ricci flow.Comment: Published by Geometry and Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol7/paper14.abs.htm