Critical Diameters and Vietoris-Rips Filtrations

Abstract

We relate critical diameters of finite configurations to the topology of Vietoris-Rips complexes. For a compact metric space and $0<r<s$, we prove that the canonical inclusion from scale $r$ to scale $s$ is a homotopy equivalence whenever $[r,s)$ contains no diameter of a finite labelled configuration at which the diameter function has zero weak slope. On Riemannian manifolds, weak-slope stationarity implies Clarke criticality. At positive diameter, when the distances realizing the diameter are smooth, both are equivalent to first-order stationarity: the absence of a direction decreasing all these distances to first order. For closed connected smooth manifolds, the Clarke critical diameter spectrum has Hausdorff dimension zero, even at the cut locus. In the real-analytic case, it is finite at each fixed number of labels and countable over all label numbers. On the unit round sphere $S^m$, $m\geq1$, positive nonantipodal weak-slope stationary configurations are characterized by nonzero nonnegative equilibrium stresses. The least positive critical diameter is $\arccos(-1/(m+1))$, and the first accumulation point is $\arccos(-1/m)$. We lift every such stress through a spherical stack construction adapted from Lovász, producing stationary diameters that approach the original value from below in the next dimension as the number of layers increases. We also give example in general metric space showing that weak-slope stationary diameters need not correspond to changes in the homotopy type of Vietoris-Rips complexes.