Small volume of balls, large volume entropy and the Margulis constant (Q1674600)

Basic invariants of a compact Riemannian manifold include the volume entropy and its Riemannian volume. When the simplicial volume, a topological invariant, of the manifold is positive, a basic result of Gromov gives a lower bound of a product of a power of the volume entropy and the volume in terms of the simplicial volume. This implies that when the volume is small, the volume entropy is big. It is known that a compact strictly negatively curved Riemannian manifold has positive simplicial volume. This paper strengthens the above bound by showing that small local volume implies large volume entropy, which can be made more precise. Note that small local volume does not imply that the whole volume is small. The proof uses the notion of filling volume and filling techniques in the systolic geometry. In the proof, this paper also establishes a new systolic inequality and a new curvature-free estimate relating the filling radius to the Margulis constant.