Rigidity of manifolds with boundary under a lower Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature bound (Q2418802)

Let \((M,g)\) be a complete, connected Riemannian manifold of dimension \(n \geq 2\) with smooth boundary \(\partial M\), and let \(f\) be a real-valued function on \(M\). Given \(N \in (-\infty,\infty]\), define the Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature \(\mathrm{Ric}_f^N\) by \[ \mathrm{Ric}_f^N := \mathrm{Ric}_g + \mathrm{Hess}(f) - \frac {\nabla f \otimes\nabla f}{N-n} \] where \(\mathrm{Ric}_g\) is the Ricci tensor of \((M,g)\), \(\mathrm{Hess}(f)\) is the Hessian of \(f\), and \(\nabla f\) is the gradient of \(f\). In addition, define the \(f\)-mean curvature \(H_f\) of \(\partial M\) by \[ H_f := H + g(\nabla f, u) \] where \(H\) is the mean curvature function and \(u\) is the inward unit normal vector field along \(\partial M\). In this paper the author obtains rigidity theorems involving the inscribed radius, the weighted volume growth, and first eigenvalue of the weighted \(p\)-Laplacian for manifolds that satisfy lower bounds on the Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature and the \(f\)-mean curvature of the form \[ \mathrm{Ric}_F^N \geq (N-1)k \quad\text{and}\quad H_f \geq (N-1)\lambda, \] where \(k\) and \(\lambda\) are real numbers. Various splitting theorems for such manifolds are also proved.