A generalization of the Cai--Galloway splitting theorem to smooth metric measure spaces

We generalize the splitting theorem of Cai-Galloway for complete Riemannian manifolds with $\Ric\geq-(n-1)$ admitting a family of compact hypersurfaces tending to infinity with mean curvatures tending to $n-1$ sufficiently fast to the setting of smooth metric measure spaces. This result complements and provides a new perspective on the splitting theorems recently proven by Munteanu-Wang and Su-Zhang. We show that the mean curvature assumption in our result is sharp, which also provides an example showing that the assumption $R\geq-(n-1)$ in the Munteanu-Wang splitting theorem for expanding gradient Ricci solitons cannot be relaxed to $R>-n$. We also use our result to study a certain class of conformally compact quasi-Einstein metrics, giving, as generalizations of respective results of Cai-Galloway and Lee, necessary conditions for the boundary to be connected and for the bottom of the spectrum of the weighted Laplacian to be maximal.