Concentration, Ricci curvature, and eigenvalues of Laplacian (Q2376322)

Metric-measure spaces arise naturally as limits of Riemannian manifolds. One important invariant of a Riemannian manifold is the first positive eigenvalue of the Laplacian. It was proved by \textit{M. Gromov} and \textit{V. D. Milman} [Am. J. Math. 105, 843--854 (1983; Zbl 0522.53039)] that for a sequence of closed weighted Riemannian manifolds \((M_n, \mu_n)\), if its first eigenvalue diverges to infinity, then \((M_n, \mu_n)\) is a Lévy family, i.e., it satisfies a measure concentration property. Later, \textit{E. Milman} [Duke Math. J. 154, No. 2, 207--239 (2010; Zbl 1205.53038); Invent. Math. 177, No. 1, 1--43 (2009; Zbl 1181.52008)] proved that the converse holds if the Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature is nonnegative. One purpose of this paper is to study the same relation between the measure concentration property and the \(k\)-th eigenvalue. Specifically, Theorem 1.1 says that under the nonnegativity of the Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature, the \(k\)-th eigenvalue of the weighted eigenvalue of a closed weighted Riemannian manifold is bounded from above by a constant multiple of the first positive eigenvalue, where the constant only depends on \(k\), but not on the dimension of the manifold. This follows from a stability result (Theorem 1.2) on metric measure spaces: A curvature-dimension condition is preserved under limit with respect to the concentration topology introduced by Gromov.