Angles between curves in metric measure spaces (Q1689540): Difference between revisions

The notion of angle between smooth curves is well understood in Euclidean spaces and Riemannian manifolds where an infinitesimal scalar product exists. Moreover, a notion of angles exists in Alexandrov spaces. In the paper under review, the authors define a natural notion of angles in general geodesic metric spaces which agrees with the standard ones in Riemannian manifolds and (in a.e. sense) with that in Alexandrov spaces. In particular, given two geodesics \(\eta_t\) and \(\gamma_t\) in \((X,d)\) with \(\eta_0 = \gamma_0 = p\) then the angle of \(\gamma\) and \(\eta\) at \(p\) (if it exists) is defined as \[ \angle \gamma p \eta := \arccos \left( \frac{d(\gamma_0,\gamma_1)}{|\dot{\gamma}_0||\dot{\eta}_0|} \lim_{t\downarrow 0}\frac{d(\gamma_1,\eta_0) - d(\gamma_1,\eta_t)}{t}\right). \] Using this notion of angle, the authors consider two types of metric spaces. The first type are the so-called \(\text{RCD}^*(K,N)\)-spaces, geodesic metric spaces whose Ricci curvature is bounded below by \(K\in \mathbb{R}\) and whose dimension is bounded above by \(N\in (0,\infty)\). These spaces cover Alexandrov spaces with curvatures bounded from below. For such spaces \((X,d)\) the authors prove in the main result (Theorem 1.1) the cosine law: given \(p,q \in X\), for a.e. \(x\in X\) there exists a geodesic \(\gamma\) from \(x\) to \(p\) and a geodesic from \(x\) to \(q\) such that their angle is equal to \[ \lim_{t\to 0} \arccos\frac{2t^2 - d^2(\gamma_t,\eta_t)}{2t^2}. \] This result was only known for a subclass of \(\text{RCD}^*(K,N)\)-spaces (Ricci limit spaces) and the proof that the authors give is new even for this subclass. The proof involves harmonic approximations of the distance function and may be of independent interest. The second type of spaces considered in this article, are Lipschitz-infinitesimally Hilbertian spaces, a class of spaces containing all \(\text{RCD}^*(K,N)\)-spaces. In previous work, the second author established a notion of `angle between three points' \(\angle pxq\). In Theorem 3.9, the authors show that \(\angle pxq\) coincides with \(\angle \gamma x\eta\) for a.e. \(x\), where \(\gamma\) is a geodesic from \(x\) to \(p\) and \(\eta\) is a geodesic from \(x\) to \(q\).