Volume collapsed three-manifolds with a lower curvature bound (Q2574910)

The authors study three-dimensional complete orientable Riemannian manifolds with a uniform lower bound of their sectional curvatures whose volumes are sufficiently small, and determine the topology of such manifolds. A closed \(3\)-manifold is called a graph manifold if it is a finite gluing of Seifert fibered spaces along their boundary tori. The following is the main result of the paper: There exist small positive numbers \(\varepsilon_0\) and \(\delta_0\) such that if a closed orientable three-manifold \(M\) has a Riemannian metric with sectional curvature \(K \geq - 1\) and \(\text{vol} (M) < \epsilon_0\), then one of the following situations holds: (1) \(M\) is homeomorphic to a graph manifold; (2) \(\text{diam} (M) < \delta_0\) and \(M\) has finite fundamental group. In particular, in case (2) above \(M\) is proved to be an Alexandrov space with nonnegative curvature [use also \textit{T. Shioya} and \textit{T. Yamaguchi}, J. Differ. Geom. 56, 1--66 (2000; Zbl 1036.53028)].