Flat convergence for integral currents in metric spaces

It is well known that in compact local Lipschitz neighborhood retracts in Euclidean space flat convergence for integer rectifiable currents amounts just to weak convergence. In the present paper we extend this result to integral currents in complete metric spaces admitting a local cone type inequality. These include in particular all Banach spaces as well as complete CAT(k)-spaces (metric spaces of curvature bounded above by k in the sense of Alexandrov). The main result can be used to prove the existence of minimal elements in a fixed Lipschitz homology class in compact metric spaces admitting local cone type inequalities or to conclude that integral currents which are weak limits of sequences of absolutely area minimizing integral currents are again absolutely area minimizing.