Essential minimal volume of Einstein 4-manifolds

Abstract

The minimal volume of a closed manifold $M$ is the infimum of the volume of $(M,g)$ over all metrics $g$ with sectional curvature between $-1$ and $1$. We introduce a variant called the essential minimal volume, $\mathrm{ess}-\mathrm{Minvol}(M)$, which is the limit, as $\delta >0$ goes to $0$, of the infimum of the volume of the $\delta$-thick part of $(M,g)$ over all metrics $g$ with sectional curvature between $-1$ and $1$. We show that, for some universal constant $C>0$, any closed Einstein 4-manifold $M$ with Euler characteristic $e(M)$ satisfies $$C^{-1}e(M)\le \mathrm{ess}-\mathrm{Minvol}(M)\le Ce(M).$$ As a corollary, these inequalities are true for the essential minimal volume of closed complex surfaces of nonnegative Kodaira dimension. We conjecture that those linear bounds in fact hold for the minimal volume.

v2: title changed, presentation improved v3: title changed, paper shortened

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