Gaussian measures on the of space of Riemannian metrics (Q891807)

Let \(\left\langle M,g^{0}\right\rangle \) be a compact Riemannian manifold without boundary and with \(\dim \left( M\right) \geq 3\). The authors consider the space of all Riemannian metrics \(g\) on \(M\) with the volume form equal to the volume form determined by the prescribed Riemannian metric \( g^{0}\) (that is, in local coordinates, \(\det \left( g_{ij}\right) =\det \left( g_{ij}^{0}\right) \)). The authors construct a Gaussian measure on the space of all such metrics, introduce the \(L^{2}\)-distance by \(\Omega _{2}^{2}\left( g^{0},g\right) =\int_{M}d_{x}^{2}\left( g_{x}^{0},g_{x}\right) v\left( x\right) \) and compute the related characteristic function. In the appendix, the authors present similar computations for a Lipschitz-type distance and apply the resulting estimates to the diameter, eigenvalue and volume entropy functionals.