Stratified spaces and synthetic Ricci curvature bounds (Q2034712)

Singular metric spaces appear when one considers quotients of smooth manifolds. In order to study curvature and curvature bounds on such spaces, Riemannian curvature-dimension, RCD(\(K,N\)) for brief, condition has been introduced in recent years, this meaning that the Ricci tensor is bounded below by \(K\in \mathbb{R}\), and the dimension has \(N\) as an upper bound. It is known that all the constructions which preserve a lower Ricci bound also preserve RCD conditions in a variety of cases, such as those of smooth manifolds, cones, suspensions, quotients, foliations, submersions. In the paper under review, the above construction is extended to more examples, including orbifolds, spherical suspensions over smooth manifolds, Kähler-Einstein manifolds with a divisor, and Einstein manifolds with conical singularities along a curve. This is obtained by means of stratified spaces, where the singular strata, of possibly different dimensions, have a local cone-like structure, in the sense that a tubular neighbourhood of a singular stratum is the product of a ball and a cone, thus allowing conical singularities along a curve. The main result of the paper states that a compact stratified space satisfies the RCD(\(K,N\)) condition if and only if its Ricci tensor is bounded below by \(K\) on the regular set, the cone angle along the stratum of codimension two is smaller than or equal to \(2\pi\) and its dimension is at most equal to \(N\). This result allows to apply the theory of RCD(\(K,N\)) spaces to stratified spaces, thus the authors obtaining in this context the corresponding results about Laplacian comparisons, Bishop-Gromov volume estimate, Lévy-Gromov isoperimetric inequality, and some others. Although the paper is very technical, it is very well written and motivated.