Distance nonincreasing retraction on a complete open manifold of nonnegative sectional curvature (Q1118174)

There is a well known result by Cheeger and Gromoll that every open manifold M of nonnegative sectional curvature contains a compact totally geodesic submanifold S without boundary such that M is diffeomorphic to the total space of the normal bundle of S. S is called the soul of M. In the article under review the author reproved known results by Skarafutdinov: 1. There is a strong deformation retraction from M to S which is distance nonincreasing. 2. If M has more than one soul then any two of them are isometric and there are infinitely many isometric copies of them in M. 3. If we also have an upper bound of the sectional curvature such that \(0\leq K_{\sigma}\leq K\) then \[ (1)\quad Inj Rad(M)\geq \min \{Inj Rad S,\quad \pi K^{-1/2}\} \] where ``Inj Rad'' means the injectivity radius. (In the preface of the article there is a misprint in (1): \(``>''\) instead of ``\(\geq '')\). The proof of these results given by the author has slight modifications against the original one.