Torus stability under Kato bounds on the Ricci curvature

Abstract

We show two stability results for a closed Riemannian manifold whose Ricci curvature is small in the Kato sense and whose first Betti number is equal to the dimension. The first one is a geometric stability result stating that such a manifold is Gromov-Hausdorff close to a flat torus. The second one states that, under a stronger assumption, such a manifold is diffeomorphic to a torus: this extends a result by Colding and Cheeger-Colding obtained in the context of a lower bound on the Ricci curvature.