Crosscap stability (Q1707394)

A crosscap is a metric space homeomorphic to the real projective space. As a metric space, it is obtained from a closed ball of constant curvature by identifying antipodal points on the boundary. When a sequence of Riemannian manifolds with a uniform lower curvature bound converges to a crosscap of the same dimension, all but finitely many of these manifolds are diffeomorphic to the real projective space. This follows from the fact that a crosscap is almost isometric to a smooth Riemannian manifold, by Theorem 6.1 of \textit{K. Kuwae} et al. [Math. Z. 238, No. 2, 269--316 (2001; Zbl 1001.53017)]. The authors provide an independent proof of this fact, which does not depend on the existence of a differentiable structure on the crosscap, but instead on the construction of explicit embeddings of the universal covers of the manifolds as hypersurfaces in Euclidean space. The construction is related to that of \textit{Y. Otsu} et al. [Invent. Math. 98, No. 2, 219--228 (1989; Zbl 0688.53016)].