Packing and doubling in metric spaces with curvature bounded above (Q2114190)

In this remarkable paper, the authors study locally compact, locally geodesically complete, locally \(\mathrm{CAT}(\kappa)\)-spaces, which the author abbreviate by \(\mathrm{GCBA}^{\kappa}\)-spaces. These spaces are natural generalizations and limits of Riemannian manifolds with sectional curvature bounded from above and they are not necessarily manifolds. A general research topic is to obtain results for \(\mathrm{GCBA}^{\kappa}\)-spaces that are known to hold in the case of Riemannian manifolds with sectional curvature bounded from above. The authors obtain several results on \(\mathrm{GCBA}^{\kappa}\)-spaces, among then the following: They prove for such spaces a local volume estimate for balls of radius smaller than a constant which they call the almost-convexity radius which are analogues of classical results obtained by C. Croke in the Riemannian case. The estimate depends only on the dimension of the space. They also show that a local doubling condition (a condition which is much weaker than a lower bound for Ricci curvature), with respect to a natural measure, implies pure-dimensionality, that is, the fact that all points have the same dimension. In the special case where the spaces satisfy a uniform packing condition at some fixed scale \(r_0\) or a doubling condition at arbitrarily small scale, they obtain several compactness results with respect to pointed Gromov-Hausdorff convergence. A class of examples of spaces satisfying the uniform packing condition is the class of Gromov-hyperbolic spaces of bounded entropy admitting a cocompact group action by of isometries. As a particular case, the authors study convergence and stability of \(M^{\kappa}\)-complexes with bounded geometry.