Vietoris-Rips complexes of metric spaces near a metric graph (Q6082667)

Given a metric space \(X\) and a scale \(r>0\), the corresponding Vietoris-Rips simplicial complex Rips\((X,r)\) consists of all finite subsets of \(X\) of diameter less than \(r\). Vietoris-Rips complexes play a significant role in geometric group theory and especially in modern applied topology. One of their fundamental properties is their reconstruction (up to homotopy) property. There are numerous results of this sort stating that if \(M\) is a metric space sufficiently close to an appropriately nice space \(X\), and the scale parameter \(r\) is chosen accordingly, then Rips\((M,r) \simeq X\). In this paper the author provides a version of such a reconstruction result for metric graphs: \textbf{Theorem}: Choose a compact path-connected metric graph \(G\) and a metric space \(X\) close to \(G\) in the Gromov-Hausdorff distance. If the scale \(\beta\) is between \(3 d_{GH}(G,X)\) and \(3 \rho(G) /4\), then \(Rips(X,\beta) \simeq G.\) The main advantage of this version are the explicit bounds depending on the Gromov-Hausdorff distance \(d_{GH}\) and the convexity radius \(\rho\) of a metric graph. The paper also contains a version of this result for metric graphs embedded in any Euclidean space. In this case, the explicit bounds on parameters depend on the Hausdorff distance, \(\rho\) and the distortion of the embedding, \(\delta\).