An extreme limit with nonnegative scalar curvature

Abstract

In 2014, Gromov vaguely conjectured that a sequence of manifolds with nonnegative scalar curvature should have a subsequence which converges in some weak sense to a limit space with some generalized notion of nonnegative scalar curvature. The conjecture has been made precise at an IAS Emerging Topics meeting: requiring that the sequence be three dimensional with uniform upper bounds on diameter and volume, and a positive uniform lower bound on MinA, which is the minimum area of a closed minimal surface in the manifold. Here we present a sequence of warped product manifolds with warped circles over standard spheres, that have circular fibres over the poles whose length diverges to infinity, that satisfy the hypotheses of this IAS conjecture. We prove this sequence converges in the W1,p sense for p<2 to an extreme limit space that has nonnegative scalar curvature in the distributional sense as defined by Lee-LeFloch and that the total distributional scalar curvature converges. This paper only requires expertise in smooth Riemannian Geometry, smooth minimal surfaces, and Sobolev Spaces. In a second paper, requiring expertise in metric geometry, the first two authors prove intrinsic flat and Gromov–Hausdorff convergence of our sequence to this extreme limit space and investigate its geometric properties.