Minimal and Harmonic Unit Vector Fields in and Its Dual Space

 The complex two-plane Grassmannian carries a K?hler structure J and also a quaternionic K?hler structure ?. For we consider the classes of connected real hypersurfaces (M, g) with normal bundle such that and are invariant under the action of the shape operator. We prove that the corresponding unit Hopf vector fields on these hypersurfaces always define minimal immersions of (M, g), and harmonic maps from (M, g), into the unit tangent sphere bundle with Sasaki metric . The radial unit vector fields corresponding to the tubular hypersurfaces are also minimal and harmonic. Similar results hold for the dual space .     

Compactness theorems and the Calabi flow on Kähler surfaces with stable tangent bundle

Abstract. In this paper, we prove some compactness theorems and collapse phenomenon on compact K?hler surfaces with stable tangent bundle. We then apply the results to the Calabi flow. More precisely, we prove, under suitable curvature conditions, the longtime existence and asymptotic convergence for solutions of the Calabi flow on compact K?hler surfaces admitting no nonzero holomorphic tangent vector fields and with stable tangent bundle. We also give some examples where the Calabi flow blows up. Received January 7, 1999 / Revised February 2, 2000 / Published online July 20, 2000     

Implicitly defined harmonic PHH submersions

The concept of harmonic pseudo-horizontally homothetic submersion, alias harmonic PHH submersion, expresses the more geometric notion of smooth family of minimal submanifolds indexed by a K?hler parameter manifold. We give results that allow to construct harmonic PHH submersions by solving some implicit equations and we apply this method to the case of sphere bundles. Received: 3 September 1998 / Accepted: 19 March 1999     

The energy of Hopf vector fields

The 3-dimensional Hopf vector field is shown to be a stable harmonic section of the unit tangent bundle. In contrast, higher dimensional Hopf vector fields are unstable harmonic sections; indeed, there is a natural variation through smooth unit vector fields which is locally energy-decreasing, and whose asymptotic limit is a singular vector field of finite energy. This energy is explicitly calculated, and conjectured to be the infimum of the energy functional over all smooth unit vector fields. Received: 17 March 1999     

Harmonic morphisms as unit normal bundles¶of minimal surfaces

Let be an isometric immersion between Riemannian manifolds and be the unit normal bundle of f. We discuss two natural Riemannian metrics on the total space and necessary and sufficient conditions on f for the projection map to be a harmonic morphism. We show that the projection map of the unit normal bundle of a minimal surface in a Riemannian manifold is a harmonic morphism with totally geodesic fibres. Received: 6 February 1999     

Harder–Narasimhan reduction for principal bundles over a compact Kähler manifold

Generalizing the Harder–Narasimhan filtration of a vector bundle it is shown that a principal G-bundle over a compact K?hler manifold admits a canonical reduction of its structure group to a parabolic subgroup of G. Here G is a complex connected reductive algebraic group; in the special case where , this reduction is the Harder–Narasimhan filtration of the vector bundle associated to by the standard representation of . The reduction of in question is determined by two conditions. If P denotes the parabolic subgroup, L its Levi factor and the canonical reduction, then the first condition says that the principal L-bundle obtained by extending the structure group of the P-bundle using the natural projection of P to L is semistable. Denoting by the Lie algebra of the unipotent radical of P, the second condition says that for any irreducible P-module V occurring in , the associated vector bundle is of positive degree; here is considered as a P-module using the adjoint action. The second condition has an equivalent reformulation which says that for any nontrivial character of P which can be expressed as a nonnegative integral combination of simple roots (with respect to any Borel subgroup contained in P), the line bundle associated to for is of positive degree. The equivalence of these two conditions is a consequence of a representation theoretic result proved here. Received: 10 November 1999 / Revised version: 31 October 2001 / Published online: 26 April 2002     

Some Aspects on the Geometry of the Tangent Bundles and Tangent Sphere Bundles of a Riemannian Manifold

In this paper we study a Riemannian metric on the tangent bundle T(M) of a Riemannian manifold M which generalizes Sasaki metric and Cheeger–Gromoll metric and a compatible almost complex structure which confers a structure of locally conformal almost K?hlerian manifold to T(M) together with the metric. This is the natural generalization of the well known almost K?hlerian structure on T(M). We found conditions under which T(M) is almost K?hlerian, locally conformal K?hlerian or K?hlerian or when T(M) has constant sectional curvature or constant scalar curvature. Then we will restrict to the unit tangent bundle and we find an isometry with the tangent sphere bundle (not necessary unitary) endowed with the restriction of the Sasaki metric from T(M). Moreover, we found that this map preserves also the natural contact structures obtained from the almost Hermitian ambient structures on the unit tangent bundle and the tangent sphere bundle, respectively. This work was also partially supported by Grant CEEX 5883/2006–2008, ANCS, Romania.     

On the volume of unit vector fields on spaces of constant sectional curvature

A unit vector field X on a Riemannian manifold determines a submanifold in the unit tangent bundle. The volume of X is the volume of this submanifold for the induced Sasaki metric. It is known that the parallel fields are the trivial minima. In this paper, we obtain a lower bound for the volume in terms of the integrals of the 2i-symmetric functions of the second fundamental form of the orthogonal distribution to the field X. In the spheres ${\textbf {S}}^{2k+1}$, this lower bound is independent of X. Consequently, the volume of a unit vector field on an odd-sphere is always greater than the volume of the radial field. The main theorem on volumes is applied also to hyperbolic compact spaces, giving a non-trivial lower bound of the volume of unit fields.     

Harmonic two-forms on manifolds with non-negative isotropic curvature

We prove that L ² harmonic two-forms are parallel if a complete manifold (M, g) has the non-negative isotropic curvature. Furthermore, if (M, g) has positive isotropic curvature at some point, then there is no non-trivial L ² harmonic two-form. We obtain that an almost K?hler manifold of non-negative isotropic curvature is K?hler and a symplectic manifold can not admit any almost K?hler structure of positive isotropic curvature.     

A Practical Criterion For Some Submanifolds To Be Totally Geodesic

Our main theorem is a characterization of a totally geodesic K?hler immersion of a complex n-dimensional K?hler manifold M _n into an arbitrary complex (n + p)-dimensional K?hler manifold by observing the extrinsic shape of K?hler Frenet curves on the submanifold M _n . Those curves are closely related to the complex structure of M _n .     

A critical radius for unit Hopf vector fields on spheres

The volume of a unit vector field V of the sphere (n odd) is the volume of its image V() in the unit tangent bundle. Unit Hopf vector fields, that is, unit vector fields that are tangent to the fibre of a Hopf fibration are well known to be critical for the volume functional. Moreover, Gluck and Ziller proved that these fields achieve the minimum of the volume if n = 3 and they opened the question of whether this result would be true for all odd dimensional spheres. It was shown to be inaccurate on spheres of radius one. Indeed, Pedersen exhibited smooth vector fields on the unit sphere with less volume than Hopf vector fields for a dimension greater than five. In this article, we consider the situation for any odd dimensional spheres, but not necessarily of radius one. We show that the stability of the Hopf field actually depends on radius, instability occurs precisely if and only if In particular, the Hopf field cannot be minimum in this range. On the contrary, for r small, a computation shows that the volume of vector fields built by Pedersen is greater than the volume of the Hopf one thus, in this case, the Hopf vector field remains a candidate to be a minimizer. We then study the asymptotic behaviour of the volume; for small r it is ruled by the first term of the Taylor expansion of the volume. We call this term the twisting of the vector field. The lower this term is, the lower the volume of the vector field is for small r. It turns out that unit Hopf vector fields are absolute minima of the twisting. This fact, together with the stability result, gives two positive arguments in favour of the Gluck and Ziller conjecture for small r.     

Kähler manifolds of quasi-constant holomorphic sectional curvature

In correspondence with the manifolds of quasi-constant sectional curvature defined (cf [5], [9]) in the Riemannian context, we introduce in the K?hlerian framework the geometric notion of quasi-constant holomorphic sectional curvature. Some characterizations and properties are given. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for these manifolds to be locally symmetric, Ricci or Bochner flat, K?hler η-Einstein or K?hler-Einstein, etc. The characteristic classes are studied at the end and some examples are provided throughout.      

A topological minorization for the volume of vector fields on 5-manifolds

A vector field X on a Riemannian manifold determines a submanifold in the tangent bundle. The volume of X is the volume of this submanifold for the induced Sasaki metric. When M is compact, the volume is well defined and, usually, this functional is studied for unit fields. Parallel vector fields are trivial minima of this functional.For manifolds of dimension 5, we obtain an explicit result showing how the topology of a vector field with constant length influences its volume. We apply this result to the case of vector fields that define Riemannian foliations with all leaves compact.Received: 29 April 2004     

Positive Twistor Bundle of a Kähler Surface

The aim of this paper is to characterize Kähler surfaces in terms oftheir positive twistor bundle. We prove that an oriented four-dimensionalRiemannian manifold (M, g) admits a complex structure J compatible with the orientation and such that (M, g, J is a Kähler manifold ifand only if the positive twistor bundle (Z ⁺(M), g _c ) admits a verticalKilling vector field.     

Kähler-Ricci soliton typed equations on compact complex manifolds withC 1(M) > 0

As a generalization of Calabi’s conjecture for Kähler-Ricci forms, which was solved by Yau in 1977, we discuss the existence of Kähler-Ricci soliton typed equation on a compact Kähler manifold (M, g) with positive first Chem C₁ (M) > 0 as well as the uniqueness. For a given positively definite (1,1)-form Ω ∈ C₁ (M) of M and a holomorphic vector field X on M, we prove that there is a Kähler form ω in the Kähler class [ω_g] solving the Kähler-Ricci soliton typed equation if and only if, i) X is belonged to a reductive subalgebra of holomorphic vector fields and the imaginary part of X generates a compact one-parameter transformations subgroup of M; and ii) L_X Ω is a real-valued (1,1)-form. Moreover, the solution ω is unique in the class [ω_g].     

Harmonicity of unit vector fields with respect to Riemannian g-natural metrics

Let (M,g) be a compact Riemannian manifold and T₁M its unit tangent sphere bundle. Unit vector fields defining harmonic maps from (M,g) to , being the Sasaki metric on T₁M, have been extensively studied. The Sasaki metric, and other well known Riemannian metrics on T₁M, are particular examples of g-natural metrics. We equip T₁M with an arbitrary Riemannian g-natural metric , and investigate the harmonicity of a unit vector field V of M, thought as a map from (M,g) to . We then apply this study to characterize unit Killing vector fields and to investigate harmonicity properties of the Reeb vector field of a contact metric manifold.     

Schouten curvature functions on locally conformally flat Riemannian manifolds

Consider a compact Riemannian manifold (M, g) with metric g and dimension n ≥ 3. The Schouten tensor A _g associated with g is a symmetric (0, 2)-tensor field describing the non-conformally-invariant part of the curvature tensor of g. In this paper, we consider the elementary symmetric functions {σ _k (A _g ), 1 ≤ k ≤ n} of the eigenvalues of A _g with respect to g; we call σ _k (A _g ) the k-th Schouten curvature function. We give an isometric classification for compact locally conformally flat manifolds which satisfy the conditions: A _g is semi-positive definite and σ _k (A _g ) is a nonzero constant for some k ∈ {2, ... , n}. If k = 2, we obtain a classification result under the weaker conditions that σ₂(A _g ) is a non-negative constant and (M ⁿ , g) has nonnegative Ricci curvature. The corresponding result for the case k = 1 is well known. We also give an isometric classification for complete locally conformally flat manifolds with constant scalar curvature and non-negative Ricci curvature. Udo Simon: Partially supported by Chinese-German cooperation projects, DFG PI 158/4-4 and PI 158/4-5, and NSFC.     

On abelian principal bundles

Let T be a complex torus and E _T a holomorphic principal T-bundle over a connected complex manifold M. We prove that the total space of E _T admits a K?hler structure if and only if M admits a K?hler structure and E _T admits a flat holomorphic connection whose monodromy preserves a K?hler form on T. If E _T admits a K?hler structure, then is isomorphic to . Received: 2 September 2005     

Conformal fields and the stability of leaves with constant higher order mean curvature

In this paper, we study hypersurfaces with constant rth mean curvature Sr. We investigate the stability of such hypersurfaces in the case when they are leaves of a codimension one foliation. We also generalize recent results by Barros and Sousa, concerning conformal fields, to an arbitrary manifold. Using this we show that normal component of a Killing field is an rth Jacobi field of a hypersurface with Sr+1 constant. Finally, we study relations between rth Jacobi fields and vector fields preserving a foliation.