Rigidity of the 1-Bakry-Émery inequality and sets of finite Perimeter in RCD spaces (Q2317433)

Geometric measure theory allows the study of non-smooth objects in a smooth ambient space. The authors here argue that the theory of RCD spaces may now be sufficiently well developed to allow them to serve as ambient spaces. RCD spaces are metric measure spaces with a lower Ricci curvature bound in a synthetic sense which, like Riemannian manifolds, are infinitesimally Hilbertian, meaning that their weak Sobolev space \(W^{1,2}\) is a Hilbert space. They include the limits of sequences of manifolds with a uniform lower bound on Ricci curvature. In particular, this paper generalises De Giorgi's Theorem, a fundamental result in geometric measure theory which guarantees the existence of a tangent half-space at every point on the boundary of a set of finite perimeter in a Euclidean space. Since the tangent bundle of an RCD space is only defined up to sets which are negligible with respect to the measure, the result here establishes the existence of a tangent half-space almost everywhere with respect to the perimeter measure. As an intermediate tool to handle the fact that the tangent bundle is not defined everywhere, the authors prove an interesting splitting theorem. It is shown that the existence of a function for which the 1-Bakry-Émery inequality is sharp almost everywhere guarantees that the space splits off a line.