Inspired by the Gromov-Hausdorff distance, we define a new notion called the intrinsic flat distance between oriented m dimensional Riemannian manifolds with boundary by isometrically embedding the manifolds into a common metric space, measuring the flat distance between them and taking an infimum over all isometric embeddings and all common metric spaces. This is made rigorous by applying Ambrosio-Kirchheim's extension of Federer-Fleming's notion of integral currents to arbitrary metric spaces.We prove the intrinsic flat distance between two compact oriented Riemannian manifolds is zero iff they have an orientation preserving isometry between them. Using the theory of Ambrosio-Kirchheim, we study converging sequences of manifolds and their limits, which are in a class of metric spaces that we call integral current spaces. We describe the properties of such spaces including the fact that they are countably H m rectifiable spaces and present numerous examples.
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We study the stability of the Positive Mass Theorem using the Intrinsic Flat Distance. In particular we consider the class of complete asymptotically flat rotationally symmetric Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative scalar curvature and no interior closed minimal surfaces whose boundaries are either outermost minimal hypersurfaces or are empty. We prove that a sequence of these manifolds whose ADM masses converge to zero must converge to Euclidean space in the pointed Intrinsic Flat sense. In fact we provide explicit bounds on the Intrinsic Flat Distance between annular regions in the manifold and annular regions in Euclidean space by constructing an explicit filling manifold and estimating its volume. In addition, we include a variety of propositions that can be used to estimate the Intrinsic Flat distance between Riemannian manifolds without rotationally symmetry. Conjectures regarding the Intrinsic Flat stability of the Positive Mass Theorem in the general case are proposed in the final section.
Abstract. We prove that if Y is the Gromov-Hausdorff limit of a sequence of compact manifolds, M n i , with a uniform lower bound on Ricci curvature and a uniform upper bound on diameter, then Y has a universal cover. We then show that, for i sufficiently large, the fundamental group of M i has a surjective homeomorphism onto the group of deck transforms of Y . Finally, in the non-collapsed case where the M i have an additional uniform lower bound on volume, we prove that the kernels of these surjective maps are finite with a uniform bound on their cardinality. A number of theorems are also proven concerning the limits of covering spaces and their deck transforms when the M i are only assumed to be compact length spaces with a uniform upper bound on diameter.
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