We obtain new topological information about the local structure of collapsing under a lower sectional curvature bound. As an application we prove a new sphere theorem and obtain a partial result towards the conjecture that not every Alexandrov space can be obtained as a limit of a sequence of Riemannian manifolds with sectional curvature bounded from below.
We study geometric and topological properties of locally compact, geodesically complete spaces with an upper curvature bound. We control the size of singular subsets, discuss homotopical and measure-theoretic stratifications and regularity of the metric structure on a large part.
We prove that a locally compact space with an upper curvature bound is a topological manifold if and only if all of its spaces of directions are homotopy equivalent and not contractible. We discuss applications to homology manifolds, limits of Riemannian manifolds and deduce a sphere theorem.
Measure contraction properties $MCP(K,N)$ are synthetic Ricci curvature lower bounds for metric measure spaces which do not necessarily have smooth structures. It is known that if a Riemannian manifold has dimension $N$, then $MCP(K,N)$ is equivalent to Ricci curvature bounded below by $K$. On the other hand, it was observed in cite{Ri} that there is a family of left invariant metrics on the three dimensional Heisenberg group for which the Ricci curvature is not bounded below. Though this family of metric spaces equipped with the Harr measure satisfy $MCP(0,5)$. In this paper, we give sufficient conditions for a $2n+1$ dimensional weakly Sasakian manifold to satisfy $MCP(0,2n+3)$. This extends the above mentioned result on the Heisenberg group in cite{Ri}.
Let $M^n$ be a closed immersed hypersurface lying in a contractible ball $B(p,R)$ of the ambient $(n+1)$-manifold $N^{n+1}$. We prove that, by pinching Heintze-Reillys inequality via sectional curvature upper bound of $B(p,R)$, 1st eigenvalue and mean curvature of $M$, not only $M$ is Hausdorff close to a geodesic sphere $S(p_0,R_0)$ in $N$, but also the ``enclosed ball $B(p_0,R_0)$ is close to be of constant curvature, provided with a uniform control on the volume and mean curvature of $M$. We raise a conjecture for $M$ to be a diffeomorphic sphere, and give some positive partial answer.