Scalar curvature, sharp bottom spectrum and geometric rigidity

Abstract

We prove rigidity in the equality case of the sharp bottom spectrum estimate under scalar curvature lower bound. Under the same topological assumptions as in our previous work, a closed manifold $(M,g)$ with $\mathrm{Sc}_g\geq -n(n-1)$ and $λ_1(\widetilde M,\widetilde g)=(n-1)^2/4$ must be hyperbolic. This gives rigidity results for closed hyperbolic manifolds and for closed manifolds admitting a metric of nonpositive sectional curvature.