Geometry of manifolds with densities

TL;DR

This paper investigates the geometry of complete Riemannian manifolds with quadratic growth weights, deriving new comparison theorems and splitting results under Bakry-Emery curvature bounds, with implications for Ricci solitons.

Contribution

It introduces new Laplacian comparison and volume bounds for manifolds with weighted measures and Bakry-Emery curvature bounds, including novel splitting results.

Findings

Derived a new Laplacian comparison theorem.

Established sharp volume upper and lower bounds.

Proved splitting results for manifolds with nonnegative Bakry-Emery curvature.

Abstract

We study geometry of complete Riemannian manifolds endowed with a weighted measure, where the weight function is of quadratic growth. Assuming the associated Bakry-Emery curvature is bounded from below, we derive a new Laplacian comparison theorem and establish various sharp volume upper and lower bounds. We also obtain some splitting type results by analyzing the Busemann functions. In particular, we show that a complete manifold with nonnegative Bakry-Emery curvature must split off a line if it is not connected at infinity and its weighted volume entropy is of maximal value among linear growth weight functions. While some of our results are even new for the gradient Ricci solitons, the novelty here is that only a lower bound of the Bakry-Emery curvature is involved in our analysis.