Comparison theorems for three-dimensional manifolds with scalar curvature bound

Abstract

Two sharp comparison results are derived for three-dimensional complete noncompact manifolds with scalar curvature bounded from below. The first one concerns the Green's function. When the scalar curvature is nonnegative, it states that the rate of decay of an energy quantity over the level set is strictly less than that of the Euclidean space, unless the manifold itself is isometric to the Euclidean space. The result is in turn converted into a sharp area comparison for the level set of the Green's function when in addition the Ricci curvature of the manifold is assumed to be asymptotically nonnegative at infinity. The second result provides a sharp upper bound of the bottom spectrum in terms of the scalar curvature lower bound, in contrast to the classical result of Cheng which involves a Ricci curvature lower bound.