The negative case of the Singular Yamabe Problem concerns the existence and behavior of complete metrics with constant negative scalar curvature on the complement of a closed set in a compact Riemannian manifold which are conformally equivalent to a smooth metric on this compact manifold. When the closed set is a smooth submanifold, it is known by the results of Loewner-Nirenberg and Aviles-McOwen that there exists such a complete metric if and only if $d > (n-2)/2$, and in general the Hausdorff dimension of the set must be at least $(n-2)/2$. In this paper, we show that the existence of such a complete conformal metric with constant negative scalar curvature depends on the tangent structure of the closed set. Specifically, provided the set has a nice tangent cone at a point, we show that when the dimension of this tangent cone is less than $(n-2)/2$ there can not exist such a negative Singular Yamabe metric.

27 pages, Plain TeX