Question

Dear all,

when reading a book of M. Berger, I learned that the injectivity radius Inj(x) on a compact Riemannian manifold depends continuously on the point x.

When the manifold is complete and non-compact, Inj may not be continuous. For example, Inj(x) decreases to zero when x moves to the most curved point on a paraboloid. However, it could be infinity at that point.

My question is, can we prove the continuity of Inj on a non-compact manifold under some conditions?

(I think that the weakest condition is to assume the finiteness of Inj.)

ps. I must admit that I don't know how to prove the continuity of Inj even on a compact manifold. I think that the argument should involve the stability of ODEs (the geodesic equation and Jacobi equation). If one of you have a reference about this, could you please tell me? thanks a lot!

Answer 1

The compactness is irrelevant; i.e if it is true for compact manifolds then the same is true for complete ones. (The same proof as in comact case works, but it is easier to do this way.)

If $R<\mathrm{InjRad}_p$ then one can construct a smooth metric on a sphere with an isometric copy of $B_R(p)$ inside.

If there is a sequence of points $x_n\to x$ such that $$\lim\ \mathrm{InjRad}_{x_n}< \mathrm{InjRad}_x,$$ apply above consruction for $R$ slightly smaller than $\mathrm{InjRad}_x$. You get a compact manifold with non-continuous InjRad.

If there is a sequence of points $x_n\to x$ such that $$\lim\ \mathrm{InjRad}_{x_n}> \mathrm{InjRad}_x$$ then apply above construction for $p=x_n$ for large enough $n$ and $R>\mathrm{InjRad}_x$. That leads to a contradiction again.