Rigidity of Riemannian embeddings of discrete metric spaces

Abstract

Let $M$ be a complete, connected Riemannian surface and suppose that $\mathcal{S} \subset M$ is a discrete subset. What can we learn about $M$ from the knowledge of all distances in the surface between pairs of points of $\mathcal{S}$? We prove that if the distances in $\mathcal{S}$ correspond to the distances in a $2$-dimensional lattice, or more generally in an arbitrary net in $\mathbb{R}^2$, then $M$ is isometric to the Euclidean plane. We thus find that Riemannian embeddings of certain discrete metric spaces are rather rigid. A corollary is that a subset of $\mathbb{Z}^3$ that strictly contains $\mathbb{Z}^2 \times \{ 0 \}$ cannot be isometrically embedded in any complete Riemannian surface.