On the structure of RCD spaces with upper curvature bounds (Q2152839)

The authors develop a structure theory for metric measure spaces that are CAT\((\kappa)\) and satisfy the Riemannian curvature-dimension condition (RCD). This is a natural sub-class of metric spaces because it is stable under measured Gromov Hausdorff convergence. The main result of this article is that each metric measure space \((X,d,m)\) satisfying RCD + CAT is a finite-dimensional topological manifold with boundary and that the interior is given by all points whose tangent cone is the Euclidean space of the same dimension as that of the manifold. They further show that the interior is geodesically convex and even carries a \(C^1\)-structure. Furthermore, the metric \(d\) on the interior arises from a \(C^0\) Riemannian metric with bounded variation. Although the introduction is written for experts, the article itself is fairly self-contained. The authors recall in Section 2 all definitions and results about RCD spaces and CAT\((\kappa)\) spaces that are needed to understand the article. This, in particular, includes the definition of the (Riemannian) curvature-dimension condition (R)CD, the definition of the space \(\Sigma_p^g X\) of geodesic directions at \(p\) and the geodesic tangent cone \(T_p^gX\), as well as a short reminder of the analysis of bounded variation (BV) functions and functions that can be written as the difference of two semi-convex functions (DC functions). In Section 3, the authors systematically study the RCD + CAT spaces by considering them as an example of a sub-class of CAT(1) spaces with certain properties. They show that points are regular if and only if they are geodesically regular (Proposition 3.11), verify that a-priori different notions of dimensions agree for metric measure spaces of this subclass (Theorem 3.15), and establish structure results for the set of regular points (Proposition 3.13 and Theorem 3.19). Section 4 is devoted to the study of (geodesic) boundaries of a RCD + CAT spaces. It turns out that a point belongs to the (geodesic) boundary if and only if it is not regular. The authors establish that such spaces are topological manifolds with boundary and the boundary in the manifold sense agrees with the (geodesic) boundary and prove their second main result, the sphere theorem (Theorem 1.2). Section 5 uses DC coordinates introduced by \textit{A. Lytchak} and \textit{K. Nagano} [Geom. Funct. Anal. 29, No. 1, 295--342 (2019; Zbl 1412.53058)] to show that the regular points of a RCD + CAT space \((X,d,m)\), in fact, carries a \(C^1\)-structure and that the metric \(d\) arises from a \(C^0\)-Riemannian metric of bounded variation. In Section 6, the authors show that the density function for \(m\) exists almost everywhere on the set of regular points and \(m = f\cdot \mathcal{H}_n\) is a (non-constant) multiple of the \(n\)-dimensional Hausdorff-measure, where \(n\) is the dimension of \(X\). In particular, they give another proof of a conjecture by Gigli and DePhilippis that if a RCD + CAT space \(X\) is weakly non-collapsed, then \(f \equiv m\) is constant almost everywhere.