Complete manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature and large volume growth (Q1923248)

For a complete open Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) with nonnegative Ricci curvature \(\text{Ricc}_M\geq 0\), the Bishop-Gromov theorem says that the volume growth \[ \alpha(r)= {\text{vol} B(p,r)\over \omega_nr^n} \] is monotone decreasing, where \(B(p,r)\) denotes a ball of radius \(r\) with center at \(p\). \((M,g)\) has large volume growth if \(\lim_{r\to \infty} \alpha(r)= \alpha_M>0\). Manifolds of this type were studied previously in many articles. In the article under review, the author proves that a complete open manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature and large volume growth has finite topological type (i.e., is homeomorphic to the interior of some compact domain with a boundary which in turn is a topological manifold), if only \(\alpha(r)- \alpha_M= o(r^{1-n})\) and the sectional curvature of \(M\) is bounded from below or its conjugate radius has positive lower bound (Theorem 1). Other results are the following. If \((M,g)\) has positive Ricci curvature outside some compact set and large volume growth, then it has the homotopy type of a \(CW\) complex with cells each of dimension \(\leq n-2\), in particular \(H_i(M,Z) =0\) for \(i\geq n-1\) (Theorem 2); every complete open manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature and large volume growth is large in the sense of Gromov (i.e., \(\sup_{x\in M} \text{vol} B(x,\rho) \geq\omega_n \rho^n)\) (Theorem 3). For the proof of Theorem 1 the author verifies that the distance function to a fixed point has no critical points outside some compact set.