The weighted mixed curvature of a foliated manifold

We introduce the weighted mixed curvature of an almost product (e.g. foliated) Riemannian manifold equipped with a vector field. We define several qth Ricci type curvatures, which interpolate between the weighed sectional and Ricci curvatures. New concepts of the ?mixed-curvature-dimension condition? and ?synthetic dimension of a distribution? allow us to renew the estimate of the diameter of a compact Riemannian foliation and splitting results for almost product manifolds of nonnegative/nonpositive weighted mixed scalar curvature. We also study the Toponogov?s type conjecture on dimension of a totally geodesic foliation with positive weighted mixed sectional curvature.

Mixed sectional-Ricci curvature obstructions on tori

We establish new obstruction results to the existence of Riemannian metrics on tori satisfying mixed bounds on both their sectional and Ricci curvatures. More precisely, from Lohkamp’s theorem, every torus of dimension at least three admits Riemannian metrics with negative Ricci curvature. We show that the sectional curvature of these metrics cannot be bounded from above by an arbitrarily small positive constant. In particular, if the Ricci curvature of a Riemannian torus is negative, bounded away from zero, then there exist some planar directions in this torus where the sectional curvature is positive, bounded away from zero. All constants are explicit and depend only on the dimension of the torus.

On Cheng's eigenvalue comparison theorem

We observe that Cheng's Eigenvalue Comparison Theorem for normal geodesic balls [4] is still valid if we impose bounds on the mean curvature of the distance spheres instead of bounds on the sectional and Ricci curvatures. In this version, there is a weak form of rigidity in case of equality of the eigenvalues. Namely, equality of the eigenvalues implies that the distance spheres of the same radius on each ball has the same mean curvature. On the other hand, we construct smooth metrics $g_{\kappa}$ on $[0,r]\times \mathbb{S}^{3}$, non-isometric to the standard metric canκ of constant sectional curvature κ, such that the geodesic balls $B_{g_{\kappa}}(r)=([0,r]\times \mathbb{S}^{3},g_{\kappa})$, $B_{{\rm can}_{\kappa}}(r)=([0,r]\times \mathbb{S}^{3},{\rm can}_{\kappa})$ have the same first eigenvalue, the same volume and the distance spheres $\partial B_{g_{\kappa}}(s)$ and$\partial B_{{\rm can}_{\kappa}}(s)$, $0<s\leq r$, have the same mean curvatures. In the end, we apply this version of Cheng's Eigenvalue Comparison Theorem to construct examples of Riemannian manifolds M with arbitrary topology with positive fundamental tone λ*(M)>0 extending Veeravalli's examples,[7]