Characterization of tangent cones of noncollapsed limits with lower Ricci bounds and applications (Q352122)

Let \(\{(M_\alpha,g_\alpha,p_\alpha)\}\) be a sequence of pointed Riemannian \(n\)-manifolds with a uniform lower Ricci curvature bound and uniform lower volume bound \(\mathrm{vol}(B_1(p_\alpha))\geq v>0\). Suppose that \((Y,d_Y,p)\) is a pointed Gromov-Hausdorff limit of such a sequence. The authors address the question: what metric spaces can arise as tangent cones of \(Y\)? Their results demonstrate that a wide variety of spaces may occur. For example, Theorem 1.2 asserts that for every \(n\geq 3\) there exists \((Y,d_Y,p)\) as above such that for each \(k=0,\dots,n-2\) there exists a tangent cone at \(p\) which is isometric to \(\mathbb R^k\times C(X)\), where \(X\) is a smooth closed manifold not isometric to the standard sphere. The notation \(C(X)\) means a metric cone over \(X\). The authors observe that such examples make it impossible to give a topological stratification of limit spaces based on the Euclidean factors of metric cones. This stands in contrast to the stratification of Alexandrov spaces. Furthermore, Theorem 1.3 shows the existence of a \(5\)-dimensional limit space with two non-homeomorphic tangent cones at \(p\). The authors conjecture that the dimensional restrictions in their theorems are sharp. That is, they expect that the set of points of \(Y\) with non-unique tangent cones has Hausdorff dimension at most \(n-3\), and the set of points with tangent cones of different homeomorphism types has Hausdorff dimension at most \(n-5\).