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1. Extremality and rigidity for scalar curvature in dimension four

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00029-023-00892-5  

   Bettiol, Renato G.; Goodman, McFeely Jackson (February 2024, Selecta Mathematica)

   Following Gromov, a Riemannian manifold is called area-extremal if any modification that increases scalar curvature must decrease the area of some tangent 2-plane. We prove that large classes of compact 4-manifolds, with or without boundary, with nonnegative sectional curvature are area-extremal. We also show that all regions of positive sectional curvature on 4-manifolds are locally area-extremal. These results are obtained analyzing sections in the kernel of a twisted Dirac operator constructed from pairs of metrics, and using the Finsler–Thorpe trick for sectional curvature bounds in dimension 4. 

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2. Volume and macroscopic scalar curvature

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00039-021-00588-y  

   Braun, Sabine; Sauer, Roman (December 2021, Geometric and Functional Analysis)

   Abstract We prove the macroscopic cousins of three conjectures: (1) a conjectural bound of the simplicial volume of a Riemannian manifold in the presence of a lower scalar curvature bound, (2) the conjecture that rationally essential manifolds do not admit metrics of positive scalar curvature, (3) a conjectural bound of $$\ell ^2$$ ℓ 2 -Betti numbers of aspherical Riemannian manifolds in the presence of a lower scalar curvature bound. The macroscopic cousin is the statement one obtains by replacing a lower scalar curvature bound by an upper bound on the volumes of 1-balls in the universal cover. 

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3. Four-manifolds of pinched sectional curvature

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aim.2018.07.003  

   Cao, Xiaodong; Tran, Hung (January 2022, Pacific journal of mathematics)

   In this paper, we study closed four-dimensional manifolds. In particular, we show that under various pinching curvature conditions (for example, the sectional curvature is no more than 5 6 of the smallest Ricci eigenvalue), the manifold is definite. If restricting to a metric with harmonic Weyl tensor, then it must be self-dual or anti-self-dual under the same conditions. Similarly, if restricting to an Einstein metric, then it must be either the complex projective space with its Fubini-Study metric, the round sphere, or their quotients. Furthermore, we also classify Einstein manifolds with positive intersection form and an upper bound on the sectional curvature. 

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4. Scalar curvature deformation and mass rigidity for ALH manifolds with boundary

   https://doi.org/10.1090/tran/8755  

   Huang, Lan-Hsuan; Jang, Hyun Chul (November 2022, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society)

   We study scalar curvature deformation for asymptotically locally hyperbolic (ALH) manifolds with nonempty compact boundary. We show that the scalar curvature map is locally surjective among either (1) the space of metrics that coincide exponentially toward the boundary, or (2) the space of metrics with arbitrarily prescribed nearby Bartnik boundary data. Using those results, we characterize the ALH manifolds that minimize the Wang-Chruściel-Herzlich mass integrals in great generality and establish the rigidity of the positive mass theorems. 

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5. Decay of scalar curvature on uniformly contractible manifolds with finite asymptotic dimension

   https://doi.org/10.1002/cpa.22128  

   Wang, Jinmin; Xie, Zhizhang; Yu, Guoliang (August 2023, Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics)

   Abstract Gromov proved a quadratic decay inequality of scalar curvature for a class of complete manifolds. In this paper, we prove that for any uniformly contractible manifold with finite asymptotic dimension, its scalar curvature decays to zero at a rate depending only on the contractibility radius of the manifold and the diameter control of the asymptotic dimension. We construct examples of uniformly contractible manifolds with finite asymptotic dimension whose scalar curvature functions decay arbitrarily slowly. This shows that our result is the best possible. We prove our result by studying the index pairing between Dirac operators and compactly supported vector bundles with Lipschitz control. A key technical ingredient for the proof of our main result is a Lipschitz control for the topologicalK‐theory of finite dimensional simplicial complexes. 

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