Manifolds with wells of negative curvature. With an appendix by Daniel Ruberman: Homology and bounded homology of universal covers (Q756157)

The authors generalize Bochner's vanishing theorem for the first cohomology group \(H^ 1(M;{\mathbb{R}})\) of a compact m-dimensional Riemannian manifold M with nonnegative Ricci curvature to manifolds with shallow wells of negative curvature. More precisely, if \(Ric'(x)\) denotes the smallest eigenvalue of the Ricci curvature Ric at \(x\in M\), then the Schrödinger operator \(\Delta +Ric'\) is positive provided \(Ric\geq R_ 0>0\) outside a set of volume less than a constant \(a>0\) which depends on \(R_ 0\), a lower bound on Ric and the volume and the diameter of M. It follows \(H^ 1(M',{\mathbb{R}})=0\) for every finite cover \(M'\) of M, moreover the first cohomology group \(H^ 1_ c(\tilde M;{\mathbb{R}})\) with compact support of the universal covering \(\tilde M\) of M vanishes. Under the additional assumption that \(\pi_ 1(M)\) is almost solvable one even obtains \(| \pi_ 1(M)| <\infty.\) The lowest eigenvalue of \(\Delta +Ric'\) can be expressed as the negative of an invariant \(\nu '\) for the Brownian motion on M, and a similar invariant \(\nu^ p\) can be defined for the Laplacian on p-forms. It is shown that \(\nu^ p<0\) and \(H_{p-1}(M;{\mathbb{R}})=0\) implies \(H_ p(M;{\mathbb{R}})=0.\) If the curvature term \(R^ 2\) in the Weitzenböck formula for 2-forms is positive then \(\nu^ 2<0\) and \(\pi_ 2(M)\) is a torsion group. The appendix contains examples which show that the invariants \(\nu^ p\) are different from those obtained by the Bochner method: For every dimension \(n\geq 5\) there are manifolds W with \(H^ 1(W';{\mathbb{R}})=0\) for every finite covering \(W'\) but \(H^ 1_ c(W;{\mathbb{R}})\neq 0\).