On the Structure of Spaces with Ricci Curvature Bounded below I

In this paper and in we study the structure of spaces Y which are pointed Gromov Hausdor limits of sequences f M i pi g of complete connected Riemannian manifolds whose Ricci curvatures have a de nite lower bound say RicMn i n In Sections and sometimes in we also assume a lower volume bound Vol B pi v In this case the sequence is said to be non collapsing If limi Vol B pi then the sequence is said to collapse It turns out that a convergent sequence is noncollapsing if and only if the limit has positive n dimensional Hausdor measure In par ticular any convergent sequence is either collapsing or noncollapsing Moreover if the sequence is collapsing it turns out that the Hausdor dimension of the limit is actually n see Sections and Our theorems on the in nitesimal structure of limit spaces have equivalent statements in terms of or implications for the structure on a small but de nite scale of manifolds with RicMn n Al though both contexts are signi cant for the most part it is the limit spaces which are emphasized here Typically the relation between corre sponding statements for manifolds and limit spaces follows directly from the continuity of the geometric quantities in question under Gromov Hausdor limits together with Gromov s compactness theorem Theorems see also Remark are examples of