arXiv research

A Riemannian orbifold is a mildly singular generalization of a Riemannian manifold which is locally modeled on the quotient of a connected, open manifold under a finite group of isometries. If all of the isometries used to define the local structures of an entire orbifold are orientation preserving, we call the orbifol…

We characterize Riemannian orbifolds and their coverings in terms of metric geometry. In particular, we show that the metric double of a Riemannian orbifold along the closure of its codimension one stratum is a Riemannian orbifold and that the natural projection is an orbifold covering.

Riemannian metrics on orbifolds are equivalent to diffeological ones.

Study finds lower bounds for solutions on Riemannian orbifolds.

We begin by showing that every real analytic orbifold has a real analytic Riemannian metric. It follows that every reduced real analytic orbifold can be expressed as a quotient of a real analytic manifold by a real analytic almost free action of a compact Lie group. We then extend a well-known result of Nomizu and Ozek…

Study bottom of spectra on orbifolds via coverings.

We study the existence of closed geodesics on compact Riemannian orbifolds, and on noncompact Riemannian manifolds in the presence of a cocompact, isometric group action. We show that every noncontractible Riemannian manifold which admits such an action, and every odd-dimensional, compact Riemannian orbifold has a nont…

The class of Riemannian orbifolds of dimension n defined by a lower bound on the sectional curvature and the volume and an upper bound on the diameter has only finitely many members up to orbifold homeomorphism. Furthermore, any class of isospectral Riemannian orbifolds with a lower bound on the sectional curvature is …

Study essential spectrum of differential operators on geometrically finite orbifolds.

Characterizes orbifolds with upper curvature bounds as reflectofolds.

Paper proves collapsing result for orbifolds without curvature bounds.

We introduce the Γ-extension of the spectrum of the Laplacian of a Riemannian orbifold, where Γis a finitely generated discrete group. This extension, called the Γ-spectrum, is the union of the Laplace spectra of the Γ-sectors of the orbifold, and hence constitutes a Riemannian invariant that is directly related to the…

Study of flat metrics on orbifolds and their moduli spaces.

The paper examines gradient Ricci solitons on orbifolds and proves their rigidity properties.

We study the geometry and topology of Riemannian 3-orbifolds which are locally volume collapsed with respect to a curvature scale. We show that a sufficiently collapsed closed 3-orbifold without bad 2-suborbifolds either admits a metric of nonnegative sectional curvature or satisfies Thurston's Geometrization Conjectur…

An old problem asks whether a Riemannian manifold can be isospectral to a Riemannian orbifold with nontrivial singular set. In this short note we show that under the assumption of Schanuel's conjecture in transcendental number theory, this is impossible whenever the orbifold and manifold in question are length-commensu…

Sharp inequalities found for orbifold metrics.

Let a compact Lie group act isometrically on a non-collapsing sequence of compact Alexandrov spaces with fixed dimension and uniform lower curvature and upper diameter bounds. If the sequence of actions is equicontinuous and converges in the equivariant Gromov--Hausdorff topology, then the limit space is equivariantly …

We study the relationship between the geometry and the Laplace spectrum of a Riemannian orbifold O via its heat kernel; as in the manifold case, the time-zero asymptotic expansion of the heat kernel furnishes geometric information about O. In the case of a good Riemannian orbifold (i.e., an orbifold arising as the orbi…

We show that a Laplace isospectral family of two dimensional Riemannian orbifolds, sharing a lower bound on sectional curvature, contains orbifolds of only a finite number of orbifold category diffeomorphism types. We also show that orbifolds of only finitely many orbifold diffeomorphism types may arise in any collecti…

We show that on every compact Riemannian 2-orbifold there exist infinitely many closed geodesics of positive length.

In this paper we consider three arithmetic families of isospectral non-isometric Riemannian orbifolds and in each case derive an upper bound for the size of the family which is polynomial as a function of the volume of the orbifolds. The first family that we consider are those constructed by Vigneras' method. The secon…

For a closed Riemannian orbifold $O$, we compare the spectra of the Laplacian, acting on functions or differential forms, to the Neumann spectra of the orbifold with boundary given by a domain $U$ in $O$ whose boundary is a smooth manifold. Generalizing results of several authors, we prove that the metric of $O$ can be…

We classify representations of compact connected Lie groups whose induced action on the unit sphere has an orbit space isometric to a Riemannian orbifold.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between suborbifolds and orbifold embeddings. In particular, we give natural definitions of the notion of suborbifold and orbifold embedding and provide many examples. Surprisingly, we show that there are (topologically embedded) smooth suborbifolds which d…

In this paper, we try to generalize to the case of compact Riemannian orbifolds $Q$ some classical results about the existence of closed geodesics of positive length on compact Riemannian manifolds $M$. We shall also consider the problem of the existence of infinitely many geometrically distinct closed geodesics. In th…

This work proves certain general orbifold compactness results for spaces of Riemannian metrics, generalizing earlier results along these lines for Einstein metrics or metrics with bounded Ricci curvature. This is then applied to prove such compactness for spaces of Bach-flat (for example half-conformally flat) metrics …

Volume is a natural measure of complexity of a Riemannian manifold. In this survey, we discuss the results and conjectures concerning n-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds and orbifolds of small volume.

We introduce orbifolds from the classical point of view, using charts, and present orbifold versions of elementary objects from Algebraic Topology, such as the fundamental group, coverings and Euler characteristic; Differential Topology/Geometry, including orbibundles, differential forms, integration and (equivariant) …

Paper shows stability of metric reconstruction for orbifolds from spectral data.

We first show that a Laplace isospectral family of Riemannian orbifolds, satisfying a lower Ricci curvature bound, contains orbifolds with points of only finitely many isotropy types. If we restrict our attention to orbifolds with only isolated singularities, and assume a lower sectional curvature bound, then the numbe…

We extend to orbifolds classical results on quantum ergodicity due to Shnirelman, Colin de Verdière and Zelditch, proving that, for any positive, first-order self-adjoint elliptic pseudodifferential operator P on a compact orbifold X with positive principal symbol p, ergodicity of the Hamiltonian flow of p implies quan…

We classify positively curved Alexandrov spaces of dimension 4 with an isometric circle action up to equivariant homeomorphism, subject to a certain additional condition on the infinitesimal geometry near fixed points which we conjecture is always satisfied. As a corollary, we also classify positively curved Riemannian…

Study cohomology of quaternionic foliations and orbifolds.

We consider how the geometry and topology of a compact $n$-dimensional Riemannian orbifold with boundary relates to its Steklov spectrum. In two dimensions, motivated by work of A. Girouard, L. Parnovski, I. Polterovich and D. Sher in the manifold setting, we compute the precise asymptotics of the Steklov spectrum in t…

The Hodge spectra help distinguish orbifolds from manifolds with singularities.

Study wave invariants for Riemannian foliations, showing independence of mean curvature.

In this paper we describe the classification of all the geometric fibrations of a closed flat Riemannian 4-manifold over a 1-orbifold.

Equivariant quantization is a new theory that highlights the role of symmetries in the relationship between classical and quantum dynamical systems. These symmetries are also one of the reasons for the recent interest in quantization of singular spaces, orbifolds, stratified spaces... In this work, we prove existence o…

We construct pairs of compact Riemannian orbifolds which are isospectral for the Laplace operator on functions such that the maximal isotropy order of singular points in one of the orbifolds is higher than in the other. In one type of examples, isospectrality arises from a version of the famous Sunada theorem which als…

In recent years a lot of attention has been paid to topological spaces which are a bit more general than smooth manifolds - orbifolds. Orbifolds are intuitively speaking manifolds with some singularities. The formal definition is also modelled on that of manifolds, an orbifold is a topological space which locally is ho…

We deal with a Lie group G acting by isometries on a Riemannian manifold M, such that the quotient M/G is an orbifold, or, equivalently, all slice representations are polar. We show that any smooth orbifold symmetric 2-tensor on M/G lifts to a smooth G-invariant symmetric 2-tensor on M. The proof relies on a fact about…

In this paper, we construct families of nonisometric hyperbolic orbifolds that contain the same isometry classes of nonflat totally geodesic subspaces. The main tool is a variant of the well-known Sunada method for constructing length-isospectral Riemannian manifolds that handles totally geodesic submanifolds of multip…

We consider the $G$-invariant spectrum of the Laplacian on an orbit space $M/G$ where $M$ is a compact Riemannian manifold and $G$ acts by isometries. We generalize the Sunada-Pesce-Sutton technique to the $G$-invariant setting to produce pairs of isospectral non-isometric orbit spaces. One of these spaces is isometric…

Let (M^n_i,g_i,p_i) be a sequence of smooth pointed complete n-dimensional Riemannian Manifolds with uniform bounds on the sectional curvatures and let (X,d,p) be a metric space such that (M^n_i,g_i,p_i) -> (X,d,p) in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense. Let O \subseteq X be the set of points x \in X such that there exists a ne…

Develops twistor theory for foliated manifolds, proving orbifold results.

We prove that the quotient space of a variationally complete group action is a good Riemannian orbifold. The result is generalized to singular Riemannian foliations without horizontal conjugate points.

We study a class of localized indices for the Dirac type operators on a complete Riemannian orbifold, where a discrete group acts properly, co-compactly and isometrically. These localized indices, generalizing the $L^2$-index of Atiyah, are obtained by taking certain traces of the higher index for the Dirac type operat…