Collapsing manifolds with boundary (Q605083)

This work examines the collapsing in the Gromov-Hausdorff topology of manifolds with boundary. There are several types of collapsing; this is made precise by stipulating that certain injectivity radii tend to zero. There is interior collapse (rounded cone tends to cone), boundary collapse, and boundary contact. The normal direction is a preferred direction; a factorization of the collapse is given. The paper examines manifolds with boundary extrinsically by extending their boundaries via a codimension 0 extension and uses a non-smooth gluing procedure. Let \((M_i^n,\partial M_i)\) be a sequence of Riemannian manifolds with boundary which converge to \(X\) in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense. The first group of results provides a fiber bundle structure to the \(M_i\). A disk bundle structure is established under certain conditions on sectional curvature, second fundamental form, and injectivity radius. Assume that \(X\) is a compact absolute Poincare duality space or that \(X\) is geodesically extendible. Given certain additional natural assumptions on the \(M_i\), it is shown that \(D^1 \rightarrow M_i\rightarrow X\) is a locally trivial fiber bundle. In the special case that \(X\) is a point, if certain natural assumptions are met, it is shown the \(M_i\) are homeomorphic to \(D^n\). Other important results are given as well which yield metric information about limits of manifolds with boundary - certain limits are characterized as Alexandrov spaces of curvature bounded below and collapsing with an ambient manifold is discussed. A rough version of Toponogov's splitting theorem is established and the Gromov-Hausdorff limits of certain sequences of manifolds with non-convex boundaries as Alexandrov spaces of curvature bounded below is given. A number of examples illustrating these phenomena are presented.