An extension of Perelman's soul theorem for singular spaces

In this paper, we study open complete metric spaces with non-negative curvature. Among other things, we establish an extension of Perelman's soul theorem for possibly singular spaces: "Let X be a complete, non-compact, finite dimensional Alexandrov space with non-negative curvature. Suppose that X has no boundary and has positive curvature on a non-empty open subset. Then X must be a contractible space". The proof of this result uses the detailed analysis of concavity of distance functions and Busemann functions on singular spaces with non-negative curvature. We will introduce a family of angular excess functions to measure convexity and extrinsic curvature of convex hypersurfaces in singular spaces. We also derive a new comparison for trapezoids in non-negatively curved spaces, which led to desired convexity estimates for the proof of our new soul theorem.