Old and new structures on Ran spaces: Length structures, completeness, and conicality

Abstract

We study topologies on Ran spaces. In the literature, two distinct topologies frequently appear: the Hausdorff topology, and a finer one constructed as a colimit, that we call the final topology. In this work, given a metric space $M$, we construct new metric topologies on $\mathrm{Ran}(M)$, called weighted topologies. They interpolate between the Hausdorff and final topologies, the later being recovered as a limit in the category of spaces. This structure equips the final topology with a uniformity, which we show to be complete. Finally we study the Ran spaces as stratified spaces. We show that, whenever $M$ is a Riemannian manifold, the weighted topologies are conically stratified, while the final topology is only so in a weak sense.