Bounds on harmonic radius and limits of manifolds with bounded Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature (Q2318023)

The authors extend two important results from the case of bounded Ricci curvature to the case of bounded Bakry-Émery curvature with \(C^1\) potential. One of is Anderson's lower bound for the harmonic radius [\textit{M. T. Anderson}, Invent. Math. 102, No. 2, 429--445 (1990; Zbl 0711.53038)] and the other is Cheeger-Naber's codimension-4 theorem [\textit{J. Cheeger} and \textit{A. Naber}, Ann. Math. (2) 182, No. 3, 1093--1165 (2015; Zbl 1335.53057)]. Firstly, under the usual condition that the volume of a geodesic ball is close to the Euclidean one or the injectivity radius is bounded from below, they prove a lower bound of the \(C^\alpha\cap W^{1,q}\) harmonic radius for manifolds with bounded Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature when the gradient of the potential is bounded. Under these conditions, the regularity that can be imposed on the metrics under harmonic coordinates is only \(C^\alpha\cap W^{1,q}\) , where \(q >2n\) and \(n\) is the dimension of the manifolds. This is almost 1 order lower than Anderson's classical \(C^{1, \alpha}\cap W^{1,p}\) harmonic coordinates under bounded Ricci curvature condition. The loss of regularity induces some difference in the method of proof, which can also be used to address the detail of the \(W^{2,p}\) convergence in the classical case. Based on this lower bound and the techniques in Cheeger and Naber's paper above and \textit{F. Wang} and \textit{X. Zhu} [``Structure of spaces with Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature bounded below'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1304.4490}], the authors extend Cheeger-Naber's codimension-4 Theorem to the case where the manifolds have bounded Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature when the gradient of the potential is bounded. This result covers Ricci solitons when the gradient of the potential is bounded.