Macroscopic scalar curvature and local collapsing

Abstract: Consider a closed Riemannian $n$-manifold $M$ admitting a negatively curved Riemannian metric. We show that for every Riemannian metric on $M$ of sufficiently small volume, there is a point in the universal cover of $M$ such that the volume of every ball of radius $r \geq 1$ centered at this point is greater or equal to the volume of the ball of the same radius in the hyperbolic $n$-space. We also give an interpretation of this result in terms of macroscopic scalar curvature. This result, which holds more generally in the context of polyhedral length spaces, is related to a question of Guth. Its proof relies on a generalization of recent progress in metric geometry about the Alexandrov/Urysohn width involving the volume of balls of radius in a certain range with collapsing at different scales.