Bavard's systolically extremal Klein bottles and three dimensional applications

Abstract

A compact manifold is called Bieberbach if it carries a flat Riemannian metric. Bieberbach manifolds satisfy an isosystolic inequality by a general and fundamental result of M. Gromov. In dimension 3, there exist four classes of non-orientable Bieberbach manifolds up to an affine diffeomorphism. In this paper, we prove the existence on each diffeomorphism class of non-orientable Bieberbach 3-manifolds of a two-parameter family of singular Riemannian metrics that are systolically extremal in their conformal class. The proof uses a one-parameter family of singular Riemannian metrics on the Klein bottle discovered by C. Bavard ([3]): each one of these metrics is extremal in its conformal class.