Restrictions on Submanifolds via Focal Radius Bounds

We give an optimal estimate for the norm of any submanifold's second fundamental form in terms of its focal radius and the lower sectional curvature bound of the ambient manifold. This is a special case of a similar theorem for intermediate Ricci curvature, and leads to a $C^{1,\alpha}$ compactness result for submanifolds, as well as a "soul-type" structure theorem for manifolds with nonnegative $k^{th}$--intermediate Ricci curvature that have a closed submanifold with dimension $\geq k$ and infinite focal radius. To prove these results, we use the comparison lemma for Jacobi fields from arXiv:1603.04050 that exploits Wilking's transverse Jacobi equation. The comparison lemma also yields new information about group actions, Riemannian submersions, and submetries, including generalizations to intermediate Ricci curvature of results of Chen and Grove.