The space of rough Riemannian metrics

Abstract: On a smooth connected manifold, we consider all possible locally elliptic and locally bounded measurable coefficient Riemannian metrics called rough Riemannian metrics. We equip this set with an extended metric which is connected if and only if the manifold is compact. We prove that this is a complete length extended metric space and the components on which the distance is finite are path-connected. Moreover, we identify the closure of smooth metrics in this space to be continuous metrics.