The lower mean curvature bound in Gromov's mean-of-the-mean-curvature conjecture

Gromov conjectured that for a compact Riemannian manifold $X$ with boundary, the total mean curvature ${\int }_{\mathrm{\partial }X}H$ is bounded above by a constant depending only on the intrinsic geometry of $\mathrm{\partial }X$ and a lower bound on the scalar curvature of $X$. Previous results towards this conjecture require, in addition, a lower bound on the mean curvature of the boundary. In the present paper, we investigate whether this extra assumption is necessary. In dimension $2$, we show that no lower bound on the geodesic curvature is needed. We estimate the total geodesic curvature of the boundary in terms of its length and a lower bound for the Gauss curvature of the surface. This confirms Gromov’s conjecture in $2$~dimensions without any extra assumptions. In contrast, we give examples showing that a lower bound on the mean curvature is genuinely needed in dimensions $n\ge 3$.