We construct short retractions of a CAT(1) space to its small convex subsets. This construction provides an alternative geometric description of an analytic tool introduced by Wilfrid Kendall. Our construction uses a tractrix flow which can be defined as a gradient flow for a family of functions of certain type. In an appendix we prove a general existence result for gradient flows of time-dependent locally Lipschitz semiconcave functions, which is of independent interest.
We examine volume pinching problems of CAT(1) spaces. We characterize a class of compact geodesically complete CAT(1) spaces of small specific volume. We prove a sphere theorem for compact CAT(1) homology manifolds of small volume. We also formulate a criterion of manifold recognition for homology manifolds on volume growths under an upper curvature bound.
We show that the class of CAT(0) spaces is closed under suitable conformal changes. In particular, any CAT(0) space admits a large variety of non-trivial deformations.
We prove that a minimal disc in a CAT(0) space is a local embedding away from a finite set of branch points. On the way we establish several basic properties of minimal surfaces: monotonicity of area densities, density bounds, limit theorems and the existence of tangent maps. As an application, we prove Fary-Milnors theorem in the CAT(0) setting.
We show that any filtering family of closed convex subsets of a finite-dimensional CAT(0) space $X$ has a non-empty intersection in the visual bordification $ bar{X} = X cup partial X$. Using this fact, several results known for proper CAT(0) spaces may be extended to finite-dimensional spaces, including the existence of canonical fixed points at infinity for parabolic isometries, algebraic and geometric restrictions on amenable group actions, and geometric superrigidity for non-elementary actions of irreducible uniform lattices in products of locally compact groups.
In this paper we discuss the sufficient and necessary conditions for multiple Alexandrov spaces being glued to an Alexandrov space. We propose a Gluing Conjecture, which says that the finite gluing of Alexandrov spaces is an Alexandrov space, if and only if the gluing is by path isometry along the boundaries and the tangent cones are glued to Alexandrov spaces. This generalizes Petrunins Gluing Theorem. Under the assumptions of the Gluing Conjecture, we classify the $2$-point gluing over $(n-1,epsilon)$-regular points as local separable gluing and the gluing near un-glued $(n-1,epsilon)$-regular points as local involutional gluing. We also prove that the Gluing Conjecture is true if the complement of $(n-1,epsilon)$-regular points is discrete in the glued boundary. In particular, this implies the general Gluing Conjecture as well as a new Gluing Theorem in dimension 2.