Schoen's conjecture on singular metrics with nonnegative scalar curvature

About 21 years old · traced to

Let MM be a closed smooth manifold, and let gg be an L∞L^\infty-metric on MM, meaning that for some smooth reference Riemannian metric g0g_0 and constant Λ>0\Lambda>0, Λ−1g0≤g≤Λg0\Lambda^{-1}g_0\leq g\leq\Lambda g_0 almost everywhere. Let S⊂MS\subset M be a closed embedded submanifold of codimension at least 33, and suppose that gg is smooth on M∖SM\setminus S. Assume that Sc⁡(g)≥0\operatorname{Sc}(g)\geq 0 on M∖SM\setminus S and that MM has nonnegative Yamabe invariant. Schoen's conjecture. The metric gg extends to a smooth flat metric on MM. As stated in this level of generality, the conjecture is false, as shown by counterexamples of Cecchini--Frenck--Zeidler.

References

Primary source

Jian Wang, Jinmin Wang and Zhizhang Xie, “L^-metrics on tori and Schoen's conjecture”, arXiv:2606.21325 (2026).

Additional references

17 papers in this index state this conjecture (2005–2026). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2602.07583, arXiv:2508.08674, arXiv:2412.02941, arXiv:2309.13861, arXiv:2302.11445, arXiv:2204.05843, arXiv:2111.05582, arXiv:2110.12157, arXiv:1905.05306, arXiv:1708.08211, arXiv:1705.02923, arXiv:1609.08849, and 4 more.

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