Positive mass theorems on singular spaces and some applications

Abstract: Inspired by the dimension reduction techniques employed in the study of the geometry of manifolds with positive scalar curvature, we establish several positive mass theorems for certain singular spaces (see Theorem \ref{thm:pmt with singularity4} and Theorem \ref{thm:rigidity with singularity4} below). In these results, we assume only that the scalar curvature is non-negative in a strong spectral sense, which aligns well with the stability condition of a minimal hypersurface in an ambient manifold with non-negative scalar curvature. As an application, we provide a characterization of asymptotically flat (AF) manifolds with arbitrary ends, non-negative scalar curvature, and dimension less than or equal to 8 (see Theorem \ref{thm: 8dim Schoen conj} below). This also leads to positive mass theorems for AF manifolds with arbitrary ends and dimension less than or equal to $8$ without using N.Smale's regularity theorem for minimal hypersurfaces in a compact $8$-dimensional manifold with generic metrics.