Notes on the Cheeger and Colding version of the Reifenberg theorem for metric spaces

Abstract

The classical Reifenberg's theorem says that a set which is sufficiently well approximated by planes uniformly at all scales is a topological H\"older manifold. Remarkably, this generalizes to metric spaces, where the approximation by planes is replaced by the Gromov-Hausdorff distance. This fact was shown by Cheeger and Colding in an appendix of one of their celebrated works on Ricci limit spaces [8]. Given the recent interest around this statement in the growing field of analysis in metric spaces, in this note we provide a self contained and detailed proof of the Cheeger and Colding result. Our presentation substantially expands the arguments in [8] and makes explicit all the relevant estimates and constructions. As a byproduct we also shows a biLipschitz version of this result which, even if folklore among experts, was not present in the literature. This work is an extract from the doctoral dissertation of the second author.