Warped products admitting a curvature bound (Q323657)

The authors gave previously a construction of metric spaces with curvature bounded either from above or from below. These were warped products of an intrinsic metric space and a fiber. This extended the cone and suspension constructions which were previously known. The authors establish a converse implication here showing that all the conditions of the construction given previously are in fact necessary. They also show that the theorems for curvature bounded from below and curvature bounded from above are in a sense dual. The first section puts matters in context and the second section gives a careful statement of results. In the third section, curvature bounds, globalization, tangent space and differentials, and convex functions and gradient vectors are treated. The fourth section deals with warped products, the fifth section deals with base and warping function CAT, the sixth section presents a similar analysis for CBB, the seventh section deals with the curvature of the fiber CBB, and the final section presents a similar analysis for CAT.