Nonuniform thickness and weighted distance (Q1014536)

No short review has room for the definitions and statements of the Theorems in this paper. We thus, present an informal description of the results. The uniform thickness of a knotted curve \(K\) is the radius of the largest tubular neighborhood around the curve without intersections of the normal discs. This is also known as the normal injectivity radius \(IR\) of the normal exponential map of the curve \(K\) in the Euclidean space \(\mathbb{R}^{n}.\) In the present work \(K\) is a union of finitely many disjoint smoothly closed (possibly linked or knotted) curves in \(\mathbb{R}^{n},\) furnished with a weight function \(\mu:K\rightarrow(0,\infty).\) The nonuniform \(R\)-tubular neighborhood \(O(K,\mu R)\) is the union of metric balls of radius \(R\mu(q)\) centered at each \(q\in K.\) As \(R\) increases, the size of these balls increases at a fixed rate at each point, but the rate differs from point to point of \(K.\) In this paper the generalized exponential function \(\exp^{\mu}\) is defined and different notions of injectivity radii are introduced to investigate the singular but injective exponential maps. All injectivity radii are compared in Theorem 1 and all singularities within almost injectivity radius are classified by the Horizontal Collapsing Property given in Theorem 2. Examples are provided to show the distinction between the different types of injectivity radii, as well as showing that the standard differentiable injectivity radius fails to be upper semicontinuous on a singular set of weight functions.