Asymptotically Euclidean metrics without conjugate points are flat (Q2110277)

A Riemannian manifold M is said to have no conjugate points if the exponential map \(\exp_{m} : T_{m}M \rightarrow M\) is nonsingular for every point m of M. Equivalently, M has no conjugate points if every Jacobi vector field on a geodesic of M vanishes at most once. In the 1940s E. Hopf proved that a 2-torus without conjugate points must be flat. His paper was first submitted in September 1943 but was subsequently lost in an air raid. The paper ultimately appeared in 1948 in an American journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. \newline \noindent Hopf's result immediately raised the question whether an n-torus without conjugate points must be flat. This conjecture remained unproved until 1994 when it was solved by D. Burago and S. Ivanov using methods of non-Riemannian geometry. Hopf's result also spurred a more general interest in the geometry of manifolds without conjugate points, and the authors describe the work of several contributors. Note that the study of manifolds without conjugate points is much more difficult than in the special case of manifolds with nonpositive sectional curvature, where the convexity of various geometric objects is a powerful tool. In this paper the authors prove the following result \(\mathbf{Theorem}\) Let g be a Riemannian metric on \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\) that is asymptotically Euclidean to order \(m \geq 3\) and has no conjugate points. Then there exists a diffeomorphism \(\psi : \mathbb{R}^{n} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{n}\) such that \(\psi^{*} g\) is the Euclidean metric. The authors note that the theorem is not true if the metric g has no conjugate points and the sectional curvature converges to zero at infinity at a speed of \(O(\frac{1}{|x|^{2}})\). Let \(x_{1}, ... , x_{n}\) be the usual coordinate functions in \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\), and let \(g_{0}\) denote the usual Euclidean metric \(dx_{1}~ dx_{1} + ...~ dx_{n} ~dx_{n}\) ~on \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\) A Riemannian metric g on \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\) is said to be asymptotically Euclidean to order m if outside a compact neighborhood of the origin it has the form \(g = g_{0} + \frac{1}{|x|^{m}} \sum_{i,j =1}^{n} ~a_{ij}(\frac{1}{|x|}, \frac{x}{|x|})~dx_{i}~dx_{j}\), where the \(a_{ij}\) are functions in \(C^{\infty}([0,1]) \times S^{n-1}\). The property of being asymptotically Euclidean can also be formulated in terms of the Melrose scattering bundle.e The authors break the proof of the main result into four steps, which they outline clearly.