The Space of Positive Scalar Curvature Metrics on a Manifold with Boundary

Abstract: We study the space of Riemannian metrics with positive scalar curvature on a compact manifold with boundary. These metrics extend a fixed boundary metric and take a product structure on a collar neighbourhood of the boundary. We show that the weak homotopy type of this space is preserved by certain surgeries on the boundary in co-dimension at least three. Thus, there is a weak homotopy equivalence between the space of such metrics on a simply connected spin manifold $W$, of dimension $n\geq 6$ and with simply connected boundary, and the corresponding space of metrics of positive scalar curvature on the standard disk $D^{n}$. Indeed, for certain boundary metrics, this space is weakly homotopy equivalent to the space of all metrics of positive scalar curvature on the standard sphere $S^{n}$. Finally, we prove analogous results for the more general space where the boundary metric is left unfixed.