Locally Conformally Flat Manifolds with Positive Scalar Curvature: Kleinian Groups, Moduli Spaces, and Euclidean Rigidity

Abstract

We study locally conformally flat (LCF) Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative or positive scalar curvature (PSC), using the conformal boundary of the developing image. For closed oriented LCF $n$-manifolds with PSC and infinite fundamental group, $n\ge5$, we bound the macroscopic dimension of their Riemannian universal covers by $\lfloor(n-1)/2\rfloor$, establish the existence of a nontrivial homotopy group above the middle dimension, and, under mild additional hypotheses, bound the Hausdorff dimension of the limit sets of their Kleinian groups in the interval $(1,(n-2)/2)$. In particular, no closed aspherical manifold admits an LCF metric with PSC. If the scalar curvature is at least $n(n-1)$ and the manifold is not isometric to the round sphere, then every smooth nonzero-degree map to the sphere expands somewhere when its Kleinian group is elementary, while the developing map expands somewhere whenever the fundamental group is infinite. We prove that the space of LCF metrics with PSC and its moduli space are contractible in dimension three for finite fundamental group and for $S^2\times S^1$, and that the moduli space is empty or contractible for smooth manifolds homeomorphic to spherical space forms but not diffeomorphic to $S^n$ in dimensions $n\ge4$. For complete open simply connected LCF manifolds of nonnegative scalar curvature, we obtain Euclidean rigidity under additional topological hypotheses at infinity (and, in dimension three, from vanishing second homology alone). We also show that, in dimensions $n\ge4$, the Euclidean conclusion can fail when neither of the two additional topological hypotheses is assumed: we construct complete contractible examples of PSC that are not homeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^n$.