Essential circles and Gromov–Hausdorff convergence of covers

Abstract

The [Formula: see text]-covers of Sormani–Wei ([20]) are known not to be “closed” with respect to Gromov–Hausdorff convergence. In this paper we use the essential circles introduced in [19] to define a larger class of covering maps of compact geodesic spaces called “circle covers” that are “closed” with respect to Gromov–Hausdorff convergence and include [Formula: see text]-covers. In fact, we use circle covers to completely understand the limiting behavior of [Formula: see text]-covers. The proofs use the descrete homotopy methods developed by Berestovskii, Plaut, and Wilkins, and in fact we show that when [Formula: see text], the Sormani–Wei [Formula: see text]-cover is isometric to the Berestovskii–Plaut–Wilkins [Formula: see text]-cover. Of possible independent interest, our arguments involve showing that “almost isometries” between compact geodesic spaces result in explicitly controlled quasi-isometries between their [Formula: see text]-covers. Finally, we use essential circles to strengthen a theorem of E. Cartan by finding a new (even for compact Riemannian manifolds) finite set of generators of the fundamental group of a semilocally simply connected compact geodesic space. We conjecture that there is always a generating set of this sort having minimal cardinality among all generating sets.