English

Positive scalar curvature metrics and aspherical summands

Differential Geometry 2025-12-19 v3 Geometric Topology

Abstract

We prove for n{3,4,5}n\in\{3,4,5\} that the connected sum of a closed aspherical nn-manifold with an arbitrary non-compact manifold does not admit a complete metric with nonnegative scalar curvature. In particular, a special case of our result answers a question of Gromov. More generally, we generalize the partial classification result of Chodosh, Li, and Liokumovich to the non-compact domination case with our newly-developed technique. Our result unifies all previous results of this type, and confirms the validity of Gromov's non-compact domination conjecture for closed aspherical manifolds of dimensions 3, 4, and 5.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.04698,
  title  = {Positive scalar curvature metrics and aspherical summands},
  author = {Shuli Chen and Jianchun Chu and Jintian Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.04698},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

v3: Final version. 59 pages, 9 figures. Typos corrected, several arguments clarified. Accepted by Duke Math. J