The Gauss–Bonnet inequality beyond aspherical conjecture

Abstract

Up to dimension five, we can prove that given any closed Riemannian manifold with nonnegative scalar curvature, of which the universal covering has vanishing homology group \(H_k\) for all \(k\ge 3\), either it is flat or it has Gauss–Bonnet quantity (defined by (1.3)) no greater than \(8\pi \). In the second case, the equality for Gauss–Bonnet quantity yields that the universal covering splits as the Riemannian product of a 2-sphere with non-negative sectional curvature and the Euclidean space. We also establish a dominated version of this result and its application to homotopical 2-systole estimate unifies the results from Bray et al. (Comm Anal Geom 18(4):821–830, 2010) and Zhu (Proc Am Math Soc 148(8):3479–3489, 2020).