The higher-dimensional Chern-Gauss-Bonnet formula for singular conformally flat manifolds

In a previous article, we generalised the classical four-dimensional Chern-Gauss-Bonnet formula to a class of manifolds with finitely many conformally flat ends and singular points, in particular obtaining the first such formula in a dimension higher than two which allows the underlying manifold to have isolated conical singularities. In the present article, we extend this result to all even dimensions $n\geq 4$ in the case of a class of conformally flat manifolds.


Introduction
Among the most fundamental results in differential geometry is the Gauss-Bonnet theorem which relates the Gauss curvature K g of a closed and smooth Riemannian surface (M 2 , g) with its Euler characteristic χ(M ) by the formula Dropping the assumption that the surface is closed, the formula generally requires correction terms as can already be seen by looking at the plane (with K = 0 and χ = 1). Moreover, these correction terms certainly do not only depend on the topology of the underlying surface, but rather on the geometry of its ends. This can be observed by considering a flat cylinder and a catenoid, two surfaces that are topologically equivalent (with Euler characteristic χ = 0) but satisfy K ≡ 0 and K < 0, respectively. Similarly, also when the smoothness assumption is dropped, the Gauss-Bonnet formula requires correction terms. A simple example which illustrates this is the object obtained by cutting out a slice of a two-sphere between two geodesics from its north to its south pole and gluing the resulting bi-gon back together along these geodesics. The "sphere with two conical points" created this way is locally isometric to the round sphere away from the poles (and thus in particular satisfies K ≡ 1), but due to the fact that we lost area, the Gauss-Bonnet formula cannot hold. In fact, we see that the formula needs a correction term which depends on the area that was cut out, or equivalently on the conical angle at the two singularities. As it turns out, all correction terms can be expressed as isoperimetric ratios at the ends or isoperimetric deficits at the singular points. For only some of the most important results of the extensive literature on such two-dimensional formulas, we refer the reader to [10,13,12,19,8].
A higher-dimensional analog of the Gauss-Bonnet formula has been discovered by Chern [9]. In dimension four, it can be expressed as where (M 4 , g) is a smooth closed four-manifold, W g is its Weyl curvature, and Q g,4 := − 1 12 is the Paneitz Q-curvature introduced by Branson and Branson-Ørsted [2,4,3]. Here, R g denotes the scalar and Rc g the Ricci curvature of (M 4 , g). As in the two-dimensional case, also the four-dimensional formula (1.1) requires correction terms if the smoothness or compactness assumptions are dropped. The most basic situation where this can be observed is for a conformal metric on R 4 \ {0} with one end (at infinity) and one singular point (at the origin). For such metrics, we proved the following result in [5].
Theorem 1.1 ([5], Theorem 1.1). Let g = e 2w |dx| 2 be a metric on R 4 \ {0} which is complete at infinity and has finite area over the origin. If g has finite total Q-curvature, R 4 |Q g,4 | dV g < ∞, and non-negative scalar curvature at infinity and at the origin, then we have
More generally, one can consider four-manifolds (M 4 , g) with finitely many conformally flat complete ends and finite-area singular points, that is for some function s j (x). Here, B denotes the unit ball in R 4 . Localising Theorem 1.1 to such ends and singular regions (obtaining Chern-Gauss-Bonnet formulas with boundary terms), and gluing all the pieces together, we obtained the following more general theorem.
Theorem 1.2 ([5], Theorem 1.6). Let (M 4 , g) satisfy (1.4)-(1.6) and assume that g has finite total Q-curvature, M |Q g,4 | dV g < ∞, and non-negative scalar curvature at every singular point and at infinity at each end. Then we have where in the coordinates of (1.5) and (1.6), we have The Chern-Gauss-Bonnet formulas in the above two theorems, generalising in particular the formulas of Chang-Qing-Yang [6,7] for smooth but non-compact four-manifolds, are the first such formulas in a dimension higher than two which allow the underlying manifold to have isolated branch points or conical singularities. It is natural to ask whether Theorem 1.1 and 1.2 can be generalised to higher even dimensions n = 2m ≥ 4 using the n-dimensional Q-curvature. In the present article, we give an affirmative answer in the case of Theorem 1.1 and prove an analog of Theorem 1.2 for a class of conformally flat manifolds.
Restricting to the conformally flat case has two main advantages. On the one hand, the Paneitz operator (see [17]) and its corresponding Q-curvature are not unique for general manifolds but for a conformally flat metric g = e 2w |dx| 2 , the n-dimensional Q-curvature is uniquely determined. We define the n-dimensional Q-curvature by the formula As we only work in even dimensions, this is indeed an n-th order partial differential equation (while it would yield a pseudo-differential equation involving a fractional Laplacian in odd dimensions). Let us remark here that an explicit formula for Q g,n in terms of the Riemann curvature tensor and its covariant derivatives, similar to (1.2) in the four-dimensional case, is difficult to obtain in higher dimensions and is currently unknown for dimensions higher than 8. On the other hand, a second advantage of restricting to conformally flat manifolds is that in this case the Q-curvature is a multiple of the Pfaffian modulo a divergence term. Thus the Chern-Gauss-Bonnet theorem can be written as for a smooth and closed (locally) conformally flat n-manifold (M n , g) with γ n = 2 n−2 ( n−2 2 )! π n/2 , (1.10) We first prove the following generalisation of our four-dimensional result from Theorem 1.1. Theorem 1.3. Let n ≥ 4 be an even integer and let g = e 2w |dx| 2 be a metric on R n \ {0} which is complete at infinity and has finite area over the origin. If g has finite total Qcurvature, R n |Q g,n | dV g < ∞, and non-negative scalar curvature at infinity and at the origin, then we have where ν := lim r→∞ vol g (∂B r (0)) n/(n−1) Here, σ n = |S n−1 | = 2π n/2 /( n−2 2 )! denotes the surface area of the unit (n − 1)-sphere.
Remark 1.4. By non-negative scalar curvature at infinity we mean for some 0 < r 1 < ∞. This assumption cannot be replaced by the weaker assumption as can be seen by considering the metric g = e 2|x| 2 |dx| 2 , which is complete at infinity, satisfies Q g,n ≡ 0 and but has asymptotic isoperimetric ratio ν = +∞ (and µ = 0, since the metric is smooth at the origin). Similarly, we also require inf Br 2 (0) R g (x) ≥ 0 for some 0 < r 2 < ∞.
Using a partition of unity argument, we then obtain the following more general theorem.
. . , p k , q 1 , . . . q ℓ } ⊂ S n be a finite (possibly empty) set of points and let (Ω = S n \ {p 1 , . . . , p k }, g) be such that each p i is a complete end of finite total Qcurvature and non-negative scalar curvature and each q j is a finite area singular point of finite total Q-curvature and non-negative scalar curvature. Then , and R is chosen small enough such that the balls {B R (p)} p∈Λ are pairwise disjoint.
To put our results into context, let us compare them with what was previously known. In [11], Fang proved the Chern-Gauss-Bonnet inequality for smooth locally conformally flat n-manifolds with finitely many ends where the scalar curvature is non-negative. Our Theorems 1.3 and 1.5 do not only generalise this result to manifolds with singularities, but we also get an explicit formula for the error terms in this inequality. Note that for singular manifolds the inequality (1.14) might no longer hold if the conical angle (and hence the isoperimetric ratio) is larger than the Euclidean one. Later, Ndiaye and Xiao [16] obtained a result similar to Theorem 1.3, but again only for smooth metrics. They did not consider the case of manifolds with several ends but only studied conformal metrics on R n . Let us remark that their work also contains some small errors which we correct here, in particular in their main theorem they only assume (1.13) and not (1.12), which in view of the counterexample from the above remark is not a sufficiently strong assumption. Nevertheless, we clearly profited from their results and, in fact, some of the ideas in the present article are in parts inspired by [11,16] -combined with the approach we developed in [5] in order to deal with isolated singularities. Let us also mention here that various normalisations of the Q-curvature exist in the literature and that, in particular, [11,16] define Q g,n without the factor 2 in (1.8). We prefer to put this factor to make the results consistent with formula (1.2) and with our earlier work [5] in dimension four.
In the singular case, the problem has previously only been studied for manifolds with edgecone singularities and V -manifolds, see e.g. [15,1,18], but these results are technically very different and none of them allows for isolated singular points.
Let us now describe how this article is organised and how the arguments differ from our previous four-dimensional results in [5]. First, in Section 2, we collect some integral estimates which are needed for the arguments in the following sections. Then, in the Sections 3-5, we prove Theorems 1.3 in three steps as follows. In Section 3, we prove the result in the special case where w = w(r) is a radial function on R n \ {0} and (1.8) reduces to an ODE. To make it easier to deal with all dimensions at once, we do not solve explicitly for the nonlinearity in this ODE as we did in [5] but rather prove asymptotic estimates for an abstract kernel (see Lemma 3.1), employing the integral estimates from Section 2. In Section 4, we introduce an n-dimensional version of our notion of generalised normal metrics from [5] and prove Theorem 1.3 for this class of metrics. Then, in Section 5, we show that every metric g = e 2w |dx| 2 on R n \ {0} satisfying the assumptions of Theorem 1.3 is actually such a generalised normal metric. The necessary singularity removal argument in this section is much more involved than our short argument in dimension n = 4 from [5], as we cannot directly apply Bôcher's Theorem in higher dimensions. Finally, in Section 6, we prove Theorem 1.5. As currently no good notion of boundary T -curvature associated to Q g,n is known in dimensions n > 4, we cannot localise Theorem 1.3 as we did in [5]. However, in the special case of domains Ω as in Theorem 1.5, we can deduce the desired result from an easy partition of unity argument.

Some Integral Estimates
Let n ≥ 4 be an even integer. Recall (see e.g. [14,Thm. 6.20]) that G y (x) = 1 |x−y| n−2 is a multiple of the fundamental solution of the Laplacian on R n . Indeed, in the sense of distributions, we have (−△ x )G y (x) = (n − 2)σ n · δ y (x), (2.1) where σ n = |S n−1 |. This has two immediate consequences that are useful for us. First, it shows that in the sense of distributions where γ n is given in (1.10). Second, we see that if u is a radial function solving (−△) k u = 0 on R n \ {0}, where k is an integer satisfying 1 ≤ k ≤ n 2 , then u is given by for some constants c i ∈ R, where c ℓ = 0 for all ℓ > 2k. Both of these conclusions follow form (2.1) with short calculations, noting that in spherical coordinates x = rσ, where r > 0 and σ ∈ S n−1 , we have The goal of this section is to derive some integral estimates which will be useful in the arguments that follow. We denote by the averaged integral over an (n − 1)-sphere of radius r in Euclidean R n and consider the following four integrals: Proposition 2.1. We have the following estimates for the integrals from (2.5)-(2.8).
i) For any r, s > 0 and even integer n ≥ 4, I n (r, s) evaluates to (2.9) ii) There exists C > 0 such that for any r, s > 0 and even integer n ≥ 4, we have (2.10) In particular, in both cases, we obtain iii) There exists C > 0 such that for any r, s > 0 and even integer n ≥ 4, we have iv) There exists C > 0 such that for any r, s > 0 satisfying 1 2 r ≤ s ≤ 3 2 r and any even integer n ≥ 4, we have |L n (r, s)| ≤ C. (2.13) Proof. i) This follows analogously to our corresponding estimate in the four-dimensional case [5, (3.17)], but in order to make the article self-contained, we quickly give a proof here. From (2.1), we obtain (2.14) Therefore, if s ≤ r, we have y ∈ B r (0) and hence obtain Integrating with respect to r, we see that there is a constants C 1 (s) such that Fixing y (and hence |y| = s) and letting r → ∞, we see that C 1 (s) = 0. This proves (2.9) in the first case. If instead we have s > r, (2.14) implies As s > r, we can fix s = |y| and let r → 0 this time to obtain This proves (2.9) in the second case.
ii) If n = 4, we have J n (r, s) = I n (r, s), and thus (2.9) yields the desired result. We can therefore assume that n is an even integer satisfying n ≥ 6. In the case s ≤ r, we compute We therefore obtain and thus, by (2.3), we have As lim s→0 J n (r, s) = 1 r 2 , we see that c 1 (r) = 1 r 2 and that all the coefficients in the second sum above have to vanish. This means that Note that by definition, for any t > 0, (tr) 2 J n (tr, ts) = r 2 J n (r, s), so that r 2 J n (r, s) = 1 + p s 2 r 2 , where p is a polynomial of degree n 2 − 2 with no constant term. Obviously, this is bounded when s ≤ r, proving the first case of (2.10). If s > r, we simply apply Hölder's inequality with p = n 2 − 1, yielding This proves the second case of (2.10).
iii) For given |y| = s, let A s := {x ∈ R n | |x| < 1 2 |y| or |x| > 2|y|} and notice, by simply plugging in both possible cases, that on A s we have Hence by the triangle inequality ||x| − |y|| ≤ |x − y|, we find On the complement of A s , we have 1 2 |x| ≤ |y| ≤ 2|x| and therefore obtain Using (2.15) and (2.16), we can now estimate In view of (2.11), the bound (2.12) follows. iv) Again, we already proved this (in dimension four) in [5], but quickly repeat the short proof here. First, we estimate the integral by and then estimate the two terms L 1 n (r, s) and L 2 n (r, s) separately. In order to estimate the first term, note that combining the assumption which in turn shows that 1 3 ≤ |y| |x−y| ≤ 3 over the region where we integrate. Hence, we obtain L 1 n (r, s) ≤ log 3. For the second integral, we have The uniform bounds for L 1 n (r, s) and L 2 n (r, s) imply (2.11).

The Rotationally Symmetric Case
In this section, we prove Theorem 1.3 for a conformal metric g = e 2w |dx| 2 on R n \ {0} when w = w(r) is a radial function. Here and in the following, we always use the notation r = |x|. In this situation, (1.8) becomes an ODE, but instead of solving for the nonlinearity in this ODE as we did in our previous four-dimensional work [5] by an explicit integration, we rather apply the integral estimates derived in the previous section. We first prove the following lemma.
Lemma 3.1. Let n ≥ 4 be an even integer and let w ∈ C ∞ (R n \ {0}) be rotationally symmetric such that g = e 2w |dx| 2 has finite total Q-curvature Then f α (x) = f α (r) is radially symmetric and satisfies Moreover, there exists a constant C ∈ R such that Proof. The radial symmetry of f α follows easily from the fact that w and log |x| are both radially symmetric. As in Section 3 of [5], we have Hence, using the radial symmetry of w, we obtain Now, we get that where K n (r, s) is defined in (2.7) and we used Proposition 2.1 iii) as well as the assumption of finite total Q-curvature (3.1) in the last steps. We can therefore apply the dominated convergence theorem, implying Similarly, as for any fixed y we have we get, again by the dominated convergence theorem, which proves (3.2). In order to prove (3.3), we work in spherical coordinates x = rσ, where r > 0 and σ ∈ S n−1 . In these coordinates, we have ∇ = ( d dr , 1 r ∇ S n−1 ). Therefore, as f α (x) is rotationally symmetric, the above yields and hence the first claim in (3.3). To prove the second claim, we note that, using (2.4), we find △ log r = n − 2 r 2 , (3.5) and therefore where -as above -we used the rotational symmetry of w and hence of Q g,n . Using J n (r, s) defined in (2.6) and estimated in (2.11), we then easily get Therefore |x| 2 |△f α (x)| is uniformly bounded, thus finishing the proof of the lemma.
Next, we prove that w agrees with some f α up to a constant.
Lemma 3.2. Let w be as in Lemma 3.1 and assume in addition either that for some 0 < r 2 ≤ r 1 < ∞, or alternatively that for some constant C ∈ R |x||∇w| < C, |x| 2 |△w| < C. Then there exist α and C ∈ R such that w(x) = f α (x) + C = 1 γ n R n log |y| |x − y| Q g,n (y) e nw(y) dy + α log|x| + C.
From (2.2), we see that Thus, from the definition of Q-curvature in (1.8), we obtain (−△) n/2 (w − f ) = 0. As (w − f ) is a radial function, we can use (2.3) to conclude that Setting C := c 1 and α := c n , we can rewrite this as We need to show that all the coefficients c ℓ in the above sums vanish. This is done similarly as in the four-dimensional case, see [5, Lemma 2.2], using either the scalar curvature assumption (3.6) or the bounds (3.7). In fact, the formula for the scalar curvature of a conformally flat metric g = e 2w |dx| 2 is and therefore |x| 2 R g e 2w = −2(n − 1) |x| 2 △w + n 2 − 1 (|x||∇w|) 2 . (3.10) By the scalar curvature assumption (3.6), the quantity in (3.10) is non-negative for |x| ≥ r 1 as well as for |x| ≤ r 2 . Under the alternative assumption (3.7), this expression does not have a sign, but it is uniformly bounded. We now use the bounds for f α (x) from (3.3) to conclude that if any of the odd-index coefficients c 2k+1 in (3.8) does not vanish, then the right hand side of (3.10) will tend to −∞ as |x| → ∞, giving a contradiction. Similarly, if any of the even-index coefficients c n−2k in (3.8) does not vanish, then the left hand side of (3.10) tends to −∞ as |x| → 0, yielding again a contradiction. Therefore w(x) = f α (x) + C.
Remark 3.3. The proof of Lemma 3.2 shows that the scalar curvature assumption (3.6) can be replaced by the (much less geometric) condition that |x| 2 R g e 2w is bounded from below. Note that the metric g = e 2|x| 2 |dx| 2 from the counter-example stated in Remark 1.4 satisfies R g → 0 as |x| → ∞, but has |x| 2 R g e 2w → −∞ as |x| → ∞. Hence, (the first part of ) condition (3.6) cannot be weakened to lim inf |x|→∞ R g (x) ≥ 0 as claimed in [16]. A similar argument shows that also the second part of condition (3.6) cannot be weakened to lim inf |x|→0 R g (x) ≥ 0.
Combining Lemma 3.2 with Equation (3.2), we immediately obtain the following consequence, which corresponds to [5,Corollary 2.3] in the four-dimensional case. To finish the proof of Theorem 1.3 in the rotationally symmetric case, it remains to express the two limits in Corollary 3.4 as isoperimetric ratios. Let us first recall the mixed volumes V k (Ω) defined by Trudinger [20] for a convex domain Ω ⊆ R n . We can restrict to the special situation where Ω is a ball B r (0) and k = n or k = n − 1, in which case we obtain the following.
We hence assume that lim r→∞ r dw dr (r) + 1 = 0 and consider two subcases: If V n (r) tends to infinity, then the claim is true (either again by L'Hôpital's rule if also V n−1 (r) tends to infinity or otherwise we trivially get lim r→∞ C n−1,n (r) = 0). If V n (r) is bounded as r → ∞, then (3.13) shows that e nw(r) → 0 as r → ∞, which in turn implies that e (n−1)w(r) → 0 and hence again by (3.13) V n−1 (r) → 0 as r → ∞. Therefore, also in this case, we trivially find lim r→∞ C n−1,n (r) = 0 = lim r→∞ r dw dr (r) + 1.
We have checked all possible cases and thus finished the proof of Lemma 3.6 and in view of Corollary 3.4 also proved Theorem 1.3 for rotationally symmetric metrics.
In the remainder of this section, we study the case where the origin is a second complete end rather than a finite area singular point. This result will be used in Section 6.
Lemma 3.7. Let n ≥ 4 be an even integer and let w ∈ C ∞ (R n \ {0}) be rotationally symmetric such that g = e 2w |dx| 2 has two complete ends (at infinity and at the origin) satisfying (3.6) or (3.7) and with finite total Q-curvature R n |Q g,n |dV g < ∞.
Then This lemma in particular has the consequence that no such metric g can have positive Qcurvature everywhere. The proof is almost identical to the above, and we therefore only give a short sketch.
Proof. By Corollary 3.4, subtracting χ(R n ) = 1 on both sides, we have where ν := lim Therefore, denoting a computation using L'Hôpital's rule as in Lemma 3.6 implies that This finishes the proof of Lemma 3.7.

Generalised Normal Metrics
In this section, we first define generalised normal metrics on R n as an extension of our definition of generalised normal metrics in R 4 in [5]. This in turn was a generalisation of normal metrics in [6] and [12]. We then prove Theorem 1.3 for this class of metrics.
Definition 4.1 (Generalised normal metrics). Suppose that g = e 2w |dx| 2 is a metric on R n \ {0} with finite total Paneitz Q-curvature R n |Q g,n |e nw dx < ∞.
We call g a generalised normal metric, if w has the expansion w(x) = 1 γ n R n log |y| |x − y| Q g,n (y) e nw(y) dy + α log|x| + C (4.1) for some constants α, C ∈ R. For such a generalised normal metric, we then define the averaged metricḡ = e 2w |dx| 2 bȳ Clearly,ḡ is a rotationally symmetric metric. Note that in [6,16] the formula (4.3) is proved for normal metrics which differ from our definition of generalised normal metrics by our additional term α log|x| in (4.1). But this additional term, the fundamental solution of the n 2 -Laplacian, is rotationally symmetric and thus in equation (4.3), e α log|x| appears on both sides and hence cancels. For this reason, we only need to prove the proposition for r → 0.
Suppose that g = e 2w |dx| 2 is a generalised normal metric. To simplify notation, we denote F (y) = Q g (y)e nw(y) , which by assumption is in L 1 . Then, splitting up R n into three regions, we have We note that f (|x|) + α log|x| + C is rotationally symmetric and hence in equation (4.3), exp(f (|x|) + α log|x| + C) appears on both sides and thus cancels. Therefore, we need to study only w 1 (x), w 2 (x) and w 3 (x). We first claim the following. and Proof. In order to prove (4.4), let η < 1 2 , and estimate Note that |y| ≤ η|x| implies and therefore We use this to estimate the first integral in (4.6). For the second integral, we then use the bound |y| ≤ 1 2 |x|, which by an analogous argument as above yields Combining the two estimates and using R n |F (y)|dy < ∞, we obtain For |x| → 0 and η → 0, both terms above tend to zero, using again R n |F (y)|dy < ∞. This proves (4.4).
The argument to prove (4.5) is dual to what we have just done. For η > 3 2 , we write Then, we note that |y| ≥ η|x| yields This can be used to estimate the first integral in (4.7). Similarly, we estimate the second integral, using the bound |y| ≥ 3 2 |x|, which gives Combining these estimates and using R n |F (y)|dy < ∞, we have For |x| → 0, we can send η → ∞ slow enough such that η|x| → 0, in which case both terms above tend to zero, using again R n |F (y)|dy < ∞. This yields (4.5) and thus finishes the proof of Claim 1.
Proof. By Fubini's theorem where L n (r, s) is as in (2.8). By (2.13), we know that L n (r, s) is uniformly bounded over the region where we integrate. Therefore, using the assumption of finite total Q-curvature and the dominated convergence theorem, (4.8) follows.
To prove (4.9), we follow the idea of Finn [12] and estimate Similar to the above, we have Similar to the estimate of L n (r, s) in Proposition 2.1, we clearly haveL 1 n (r, s) ≤ log 3 · |E M |. We estimate the termL 2 n (r, s) as follows. Observe that if we have |rσ − y| ≤ |y| 3 then We can thus boundL 2 n (r, s) by the situation where E M is a n-dimensional disc centred at the point y r orthogonal to y, in which case we get Combining these estimates, we have Using the two claims, it is easy to finish the proof of Proposition 4.2. Combining (4.4), (4.5) and (4.8), as well as Jensen's inequality, we obtain for r → 0 as r → 0. Combining this with (4.9), we find which is equivalent to (4.3), thus finishing the proof of Proposition 4.2 The Proposition 4.2 then immediately implies the following two corollaries. Corollary 4.3. Let g be a generalised normal metric on R n \{0} with averaged metricḡ and define the mixed volumes V k (with respect to g) andV k (with respect toḡ) as in Definition 3.5. Then we have d dr V n (r) = d drV n (r)(1 + ε(r)), (4.11) V n−1 (r) =V n−1 (r)(1 + ε(r)), (4.12) where ε(r) → 0 as r → 0 or r → ∞.
Corollary 4.4. Suppose that the metric g = e 2w |dx| 2 on R n \ {0} is a generalised normal metric that is complete and has a finite area singularity at {0} thenḡ = e 2w |dx| 2 is complete and has a finite area singularity over {0}.
In order to conclude that Theorem 1.3 holds forw, we need to either show the geometric property thatḡ has positive scalar curvature at infinity and the origin, as in (3.6), or alternatively verify the analytical assumption (3.7). These latter bounds are easy to verify for the averaged conformal factor of a generalised normal metric. In fact, we prove a slightly more general result here which we can then also use in the next section.
Lemma 4.5. Suppose that g = e 2w |dx| 2 is a metric on R n \{0} with finite total Q-curvature R n |Q g,n |e nw dx < ∞.
Hence, Equation (2.12), the assumption of finite total Q-curvature, and the rotational symmetry ofv(r) imply This establishes the lemma.
Obviously, if g = e 2w |dx| 2 is a generalised normal metric on R n \ {0}, then v = w and hence (4.15) gives the desired bounds forw. This allows us to now prove Theorem 1.3 under the assumption that g = e 2w |dx| 2 is a generalised normal metric. where the isoperimetric ratios (given in Definition 3.5) are taken with respect to g andḡ, respectively. Thus, in order to obtain Theorem 1.3 for the generalised normal metric g, we need to only show that

Singularity Removal Theorem
Let g = e 2w |dx| 2 be a metric on R n \ {0} satisfying the assumptions of Theorem 1.3. In this section, we show that then g is a generalised normal metric. Together with the results from Section 4, this completes the proof of Theorem 1.3.
Proposition 5.1. Suppose that the metric g = e 2w |dx| 2 is a complete finite area metric on R n \ {0} with finite total Q-curvature R n |Q g,n | e nw dx < ∞ and non-negative scalar curvature at infinity and at the origin. Then it is a generalised normal metric in the sense of Definition 4.1 For g = e 2w |dx| 2 , we define the symmetrisation of w with respect to x 0 bȳ Clearlyw x0 is rotationally symmetric with respect to x 0 . If x 0 = 0 then we will often writē w 0 (x) =w(x).
Lemma 5.2. Let g = e 2w |dx| 2 be a complete finite area metric on R n \ {0} with finite total Q-curvature and non-negative scalar curvature at infinity and at the origin. Then for x 0 close enough to the origin, the symmetrised metricḡ x0 = e 2wx 0 |dx| 2 has finite total Q-curvature and non-negative scalar curvature at infinity and at the origin.
Furthermore, as ∇ = ( d dr , 1 r ∇ S n−1 ) in spherical coordinates around x 0 , we have and therefore For x 0 and x sufficiently close to the origin, the integrand on the right hand side of (5.1) is non-positive and hence Rḡ x 0 (x) ≥ 0 if x 0 and x are sufficiently close to the origin. Moreover, Rḡ x 0 (x) ≥ 0 also holds whenever x is sufficiently large. Furthermore Qḡ x 0 ,n is absolutely integrable with respect to dVḡ x 0 . This follows from which implies by Fubini's theorem Henceḡ x0 has finite total Q-curvature.

Now, let us consider
v(x) := 1 γ n R n log |y| |x − y| Q g,n (y) e nw(y) dy (5.2) and its symmetrisation Then, since (−△) n/2 v = 2Q n,g e nw = (−△) n/2 w, we also have Considering first x 0 = 0, we note that by Lemma 5.2,ḡ = e 2w |dx| 2 has non-negative scalar curvature at infinity and at the origin and by Lemma 4.5,v satisfies |△v(r)| ≤ C r 2 , |∇v(r)| ≤ C r , for some constant C ∈ R. Thus, by an argument as in Lemma 3.2, we obtain w(x) =v(x) + C 0 + α log r, for some constants C 0 and α. Further note that for x 0 = 0, the Lebesgue differentiation theorem implies that lim r→0w x0 (x) = w(x 0 ), where r = |x − x 0 |. Therefore, we obtain We can now prove the main result of this section.
Proof of Proposition 5.1. Let v be given by (5.2) and recall from the above that Over the origin (−△) n/2 (w − v) must equal the sum of Dirac measures and it's derivatives as they are the unique distributions supported on a point. In view of (5.3), we conclude that We first prove the following claim.
Proof. For arbitrary x 0 , we consider the symmetrisation where r = |x − x 0 |. As the integrand is bounded over the origin by (5.3), ψ x0 is well defined. Furthermore, ψ x0 is rotationally symmetric about x 0 and by (5.4), we have Hence, by (2.3), we see that for We want to conclude that all coefficients apart from c 1 vanish. As ψ x0 is bounded at x 0 , all the even-index coefficients c n−2k (including c n ) have to vanish. For the odd-index coefficients c 2k+1 , one can easily reproduce the arguments from Lemma 3.2, noting that by Lemma 5.2, g x0 = e 2wx 0 |dx| 2 has non-negative scalar curvature at infinity and by an argument as in Lemma 4.5,v x0 + α log|x| satisfies for some constant C. This shows that ψ x0 (x) ≡ c 1 . (Of course, in view of (5.3), we have c 1 = C 0 .) Let us point out here that we do not need thatḡ x0 = e 2wx 0 |dx| 2 has non-negative scalar curvature at the origin, hence smallness of |x 0 | is not needed.

Now we conclude that
As x 0 was arbitrary, this means that w(x)−v(x)−α log|x| is harmonic, proving Claim 1.
To complete the proof of the proposition, we show that w(x) − v(x) − α log|x| is in fact a constant. This part of the proof is similar to the four-dimensional case [5,Section 4].

Multiple ends and cone points
In this section we extend the Chern-Gauss-Bonnet formula to cover the case of a domain conformal to S n with several ends and cone points as in Theorem 1.5.
Proof of Theorem 1.5. Let Λ = {p 1 , . . . , p k , q 1 , . . . , q ℓ } be the set of ends and singular points and pick some arbitrary point N ∈ S n \ Λ. Then, we consider the stereographic projection π : S n \ {N } → R n sending N to infinity. We now identify Λ = {p 1 , . . . , p k , q 1 , . . . , q ℓ } with its images in R n under this stereographic projection and interpret the metric g on Ω as a metric on R n \ {p 1 , . . . , p k }. Hence, there is a function w that is smooth away from Λ ⊂ R n such that g = e 2w |dx| 2 .
Let us then fix a partition of unity {ϕ i (x)} i=0,...k+ℓ consisting of smooth functions such that ϕ i has support in B 2R (p i ) and satisfies ϕ i ≡ 1 on B R (p i ) for i = 1, . . . , k, and ϕ j has support in B 2R (q j ) and satisfies ϕ j ≡ 1 on B R (q j ) for j = k + 1, . . . k + ℓ. We can make all these balls of radius 2R disjoint by choosing R small enough. The function ϕ 0 (x) is given by the condition ϕ 0 (x) + ϕ 1 (x) + . . . + ϕ k+ℓ (x) ≡ 1, ∀x ∈ R n .
Let w i (x) = w(x)ϕ i (x) and consider the metrics g i = e 2wi |dx| 2 .
By assumption, the metrics g i , i = 1, . . . , k, are complete with non-negative scalar curvature near the end p i . Moreover, as w i ≡ 0 outside B 2R (p i ), we see that g i has finite total Qcurvature and is complete at infinity with zero scalar curvature. Fixing some index i, we can assume without loss of generality that p i is the origin. We consider the symmetrisation where r = |x|.
Clearly, the arguments from Section 4 and 5 go through, and we can therefore argue as in Lemma 3.7 to conclude that − 1 γ n R n Q gi,n dV gi = 1 + ν i , and where we used the fact that the Euclidean end at infinity has asymptotic isoperimetric ratio 1 and that ϕ i ≡ 1 on B R (p i ).