Closed geodesics and volume growth of open manifolds with sectional curvature bounded from below (Q2448461)

The authors study complete, noncompact Riemannian manifolds \(M\) with sectional curvature bounded from below by a nonnegative constant. They prove that, if \(M\) is such a manifold and \(N \subset M\) a compact codimension \(k\) submanifold without boundary, then the tube of radius \(r\) about \(N\) has volume at most the product of the volume of \(N\) and the volume of the Euclidean \(k\)-ball of radius \(r\). They consider the ratio \(\mu(m,r)={\text{Vol} B_M(m,r)}/{\text{Vol} B_{\mathbb{R}^{n}}(0,r)}\). Let \[ \mu(m)=\limsup_{r \to \infty}\mu(m,r) \] and let \(\mu(M)=\inf_{m \in M} \mu(m)\). They prove that \(\mu(M)\) never exceeds the length of any closed geodesic, and reaches the length of a closed geodesic just when \(M=S^1 \times \mathbb{R}^{n-1}\) with flat metric. Finally, for any complete Riemannian manifold \(M\) with sectional curvature bounded by a negative constant, the authors prove a lower bound on the lengths of closed geodesics. They make use of the Cheeger-Gromoll soul theorem, and the Bishop-Gromov and Rauch comparison theorems.