• Communications of the Korean Mathematical Society
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.365-374
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• 1995

On a compact manifold without conjugate points, the volume entropy can be obtained as the average mean curvature of the horospheres in the universal covering space. In the case when the volume entropy is zero, we prove that the universal covering space is diffeomorphic to a product space with a line factor. This fact can be considered as a surporting evidence for the Mane's conjecture, which claims the flatness of the mainfold.

• Journal of the Korean Mathematical Society
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.351-361
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• 1995

Let M be a complete open Riemannian manifold. When the sectional curvature $K_M$ of M is nonpositive, Gromov has defined, in his lectures [3], the ideal boundary of M, and used it to study the geometric structure of M. In a Hadamard manifold, a simply connected manifold with nonpositive sectional curvature, a point at infinity can be defined as an equivalence class of rays. He proved many interesting theorems using this definition of ideal boundary and the so-called Tit's metric on it. He also suggested a counterpart to this for nonnegative curvature case. This idea has been taken up by Kasue to study the structure of complete open manifolds with asympttically nonnegative curvature [14]. Motivated by these works, we will define an idela boundary of a general noncompact manifold M, and study its structure.