Spines and topology of thin Riemannian manifolds
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- by Stephanie B. Alexander and Richard L. Bishop PDF
- Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 355 (2003), 4933-4954 Request permission
Abstract:
Consider Riemannian manifolds $M$ for which the sectional curvature of $M$ and second fundamental form of the boundary $B$ are bounded above by one in absolute value. Previously we proved that if $M$ has sufficiently small inradius (i.e. all points are sufficiently close to the boundary), then the cut locus of $B$ exhibits canonical branching behavior of arbitrarily low branching number. In particular, if $M$ is thin in the sense that its inradius is less than a certain universal constant (known to lie between $.108$ and $.203$), then $M$ collapses to a triply branched simple polyhedral spine. We use a graphical representation of the stratification structure of such a collapse, and relate numerical invariants of the graph to topological invariants of $M$ when $B$ is simply connected. In particular, the number of connected strata of the cut locus is a topological invariant. When $M$ is $3$-dimensional and compact, $M$ has complexity $0$ in the sense of Matveev, and is a connected sum of $p$ copies of the real projective space $P^3$, $t$ copies chosen from the lens spaces $L(3,\pm 1)$, and $\ell$ handles chosen from $S^2\times S^1$ or $S^2\tilde \times S^1$, with $\beta$ 3-balls removed, where $p+t+\ell +\beta \ge 2$. Moreover, we construct a thin metric for every graph, and hence for every homeomorphism type on the list.References
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Additional Information
- Stephanie B. Alexander
- Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois, 1409 W. Green St., Urbana, Illinois 61801
- Email: sba@math.uiuc.edu
- Richard L. Bishop
- Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois, 1409 W. Green St., Urbana, Illinois 61801
- Email: bishop@math.uiuc.edu
- Received by editor(s): June 4, 2001
- Received by editor(s) in revised form: July 12, 2002
- Published electronically: July 28, 2003
- © Copyright 2003 American Mathematical Society
- Journal: Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 355 (2003), 4933-4954
- MSC (2000): Primary 53C21, 57M50
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/S0002-9947-03-03163-5
- MathSciNet review: 1997598