Hardy--Littlewood maximal operators on certain manifolds with bounded geometry

In this paper we study the $L^p$ boundedness of the centred and the uncentred Hardy--Littlewood maximal operators on certain Riemannian manifolds with bounded geometry. Our results complement those of various authors. We show that, under mild assumptions, $L^p$ estimates for the centred operator are ``stable'' under conformal changes of the metric, and prove sharp~$L^p$ estimates for the centred operator on Riemannian models with pinched negative scalar curvature. Furthermore, we prove that the centred operator is of weak type $(1,1)$ on the connected sum of two space forms with negative curvature, whereas the uncentred operator is, perhaps surprisingly, bounded only on $L^\infty$. We also prove that if two locally doubling geodesic metric measure spaces enjoying the uniform ball size condition are strictly quasi-isometric, then they share the same boundedness properties for both the centred and the uncentred maximal operator. Finally, we discuss some $L^p$ mapping properties for the centred operator on a specific Riemannian surface introduced by Str\"omberg, providing new interesting results.