Complete surfaces with finite total curvature (Q1173923)

The goal of the paper is to verify a special case of the following conjecture of Yau and the authors. Let \(M\) be an \(n\)-dimensional complete Riemannian manifold, with nonnegative Ricci curvature, such that there exists a point \(p\in M\), for which the volume growth of the balls \(B_ p(r)\) centered at \(p\) with radius \(r\) satisfies \(\text{Vol}(B_ p(r))=O(r^ \alpha)\) as \(r\to \infty\) for some integer \(\alpha\geq 1\). Set \(H_ k(M)=\{f\mid \Delta f\equiv 0 \text{ and }| f| (x)=O(r^ k(x))\}\). Conjecture: \(\dim H_ k(M)\leq \dim H_ k(\mathbb{R}^ \alpha)\). In this work, complete surfaces with integrable Gaussian curvature are considered. For such surfaces, some inequalities and limits are proved that control the growth of Green's functions and the behaviour of the geodesic distance at infinity, when compared to the conformally equivalent flat metric. As an application of these results, sharp upper and lower bounds are obtained for \(\dim H_ k(M)\) in terms of the area growth of the ends of \(M\). Further results include the proof of an isoperimetric inequality and a Poincaré inequality, which are combined to prove a Harnack inequality for uniformly elliptic operators with measurable coefficients on \(M\).