Index theory and deformations of open nonnegatively curved manifolds (Q2103546)

Any open connected Riemannian manifold with a complete metric of nonnegative sectional curvature is diffeomorphic to a tubular neighborhood of a closed totally convex submanifold -- the soul -- by a classical result of Cheeger-Gromoll. Let \(V\) be an open connected spin manifold with a complete metric of non-negative sectional curvature \(K \geq 0\). Denote the space of such metrics on \(V\) by \(\mathcal{R}_{K \geq 0}(V)\). The homotopy groups of this space are studied, building on earlier techniques of Hitchin. The main theorem shows that if the soul of \(V\) (as above) is not flat, and either (i) \(V \simeq \mathbb{R} \times (\text{closed spin manifold})\), or (ii) the normal sphere bundle to the soul has no section, and for every metric in the path component of \(g\) in \(\mathcal{R}_{K \geq 0}(V)\), the normal exponential map to the soul is a diffeomorphism; then \(\pi_{m-n}(\mathcal{R}_{K \geq 0}(V))\) has an element of order two if \(m \geq n \geq 6\) and \(m \equiv 0,1 \bmod 8\). In Corollary 1.2 the author shows that the theorem applies to a large number of examples.