Local Currents in Metric Spaces

Ambrosio and Kirchheim presented a theory of currents with finite mass in complete metric spaces. We develop a variant of the theory that does not rely on a finite mass condition, closely paralleling the classical Federer-Fleming theory. If the underlying metric space is an open subset of a Euclidean space, we obtain a natural chain monomorphism from general metric currents to general classical currents whose image contains the locally flat chains and which restricts to an isomorphism for locally normal currents. We give a detailed exposition of the slicing theory for locally normal currents with respect to locally Lipschitz maps, including the rectifiable slices theorem, and of the compactness theorem for locally integral currents in locally compact metric spaces, assuming only standard results from analysis and measure theory.