The Gauss-Bonnet inequality beyond aspherical conjecture (Q6169592): Difference between revisions

Let \((M^n,g)\) be a Riemannian manifold with non-trivial second homotopy group \(\pi_2\). We introduce the Gauss-Bonnet quantity as \[ Q_{GB}(M,g) = \inf\left\{\int_{S^{2}} R(g)\circ fd\sigma_{f^{\ast}g}\mid f:S^{2}\to M,[f]\neq 0\in\pi_{2}(M)\right\}, \] where \(R\) is the scalar curvature. The author focuses on the following question: Do we have \[ Q_{GB}(M,g)\leq 8\pi \] for any closed Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) with nonnegative scalar curvature? Let us recall that the ``aspherical conjecture'' asserts that if a closed manifold has contractible universal covering then it admits no smooth metric with positive scalar curvature. This conjecture is now known to hold for closed manifolds with dimension no greater then five. In this context the author would like to give an affirmative answer to the above question for those closed manifolds whose universal covering \(\bar{M}\) has vanishing homology group \(H_k(\bar{M},\mathbb Z)\) for all \(k\geq 3\). The main result is as follows. Theorem. Let \(2\leq n\leq 5\) be an integer. Assume that \((M^n,g)\) is a closed orientable Riemannian manifold with nonnegative scalar curvature, whose universal covering \(\bar{M}\) has vanishing homology group \(H_k(\bar{M},\mathbb Z)\) for all \(k\geq 3\). Then we have: (1) Either \((M,g)\) is flat; (2) Or \(\pi_2(M)\neq 0\) and \(Q_{GB}(M,g)\leq 8\pi\), where the equality holds if and only if the universal covering of \((M,g)\) is isometric to \((\mathrm{S}^{2}\times\mathbb R^{n-2}, g_1 + g_{euc})\). Here \(g_1\) is a smooth metric on \(\mathrm{S}^{2}\) with nonnegative sectional curvature and \(g_{euc}\) is the Euclidean metric on \(\mathbb R^{n-2}\). The author says that after a slight modification one can strengthen the above statement as follows. Theorem. Let \(2\leq n\leq 5\) be an integer. The conclusion of the previous theorem holds for any closed orientable Riemannian manifold \((M^n,g)\) with nonnegative scalar curvature which admits a non-zero degree map to another closed orientable manifold \(M_0\) whose universal covering \(\bar{M_0}\) has vanishing homology group \(H_{k}(\bar{M_0},\mathbb Z)\) for all \(k\geq 3\). The above result can be viewed as a further refinement of the dominated version of the ``aspherical conjecture'' proven in low dimension in [\textit{O. Chodosh} and \textit{C. Li}, ``Generalized soap bubbels and the topology of manifolds with positive scalar curvature'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:2008.11888}]. For the proof, most of the work is devoted to review cut-and-paste and slice-and-dice arguments in detail.