Ricci curvature and the topology of open manifolds

In this paper, we prove that an open Riemannian n-manifold with Ricci curvature and for some is diffeomorphic to a Euclidean n-space if the volume growth of geodesic balls around p is not too far from that of the balls in . We also prove that a complete n-manifold M with is diffeomorphic to if , where is the volume of unit ball in . Received 5 May, 1997