Fundamental groups of spaces with Bakry-Emery Ricci tensor bounded below (Q490780)

In this paper the author generalizes the arguments of Cheeger-Colding's Almost Splitting Theorem in the proof of two results on the fundamental group of Riemannian manifolds to the smooth metric space setting. The first result is an extension of a theorem of \textit{G. Yun} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 125, No. 5, 1517--1522 (1997; Zbl 0881.53031)]. Given a smooth metric measure space with almost non-negative Bakry-Emery Ricci curvature and volume bounded from below, then its fundamental group is almost abelian. As a second result the author shows that the number of generators of the fundamental group is uniformly bounded. This extends a result of \textit{V. Kapovitch} and \textit{B. Wilking} [``Structure of fundamental groups of manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded below'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1105.5955v2}] and is a strengthening of a theorem of \textit{G. Wei} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 110, No. 1, 197--199 (1990; Zbl 0708.53038)] which shows that under the same conditions, the fundamental group has polynomial growth. For proving these results, the author also presents some essential tools used for the extension to the smooth metric measure space setting: f-Laplacian comparison, gradient estimate, segment inequality, the quantitative maximum principle for smooth metric measure spaces.