The classification of (m, \rho)-quasi-Einstein manifolds

If there exist a smooth function f on $(M^n, g)$ and three real constants $m,\rho ,\lambda $ ( $0<m\le \infty $ ) such that $$\begin{aligned} R_{ij}+f_{ij}-\frac{1}{m}f_if_j=(\rho R+\lambda ) g_{ij}, \end{aligned}$$ we call $(M^n,g)$ a $(m,\rho )$ -quasi-Einstein manifold. Here $R_{ij}$ is the Ricci curvature and R is the scalar curvature of the metric g, respectively. This is a special case of the so-called generalized quasi-Einstein manifold which was a natural generalization of gradient Ricci solitons associated with the Hamilton’s Ricci flow. In this paper, we first obtain some rigidity results for compact $(m,\rho )$ -quasi-Einstein manifolds. Then, we give some classifications under the assumption that the Bach tensor of $(M^n,g)$ is flat.     

Almost Ricci solitons and K-contact geometry

We give a short Lie-derivative theoretic proof of the following recent result of Barros et al. “A compact non-trivial almost Ricci soliton with constant scalar curvature is gradient, and isometric to a Euclidean sphere”. Next, we obtain the result: a complete almost Ricci soliton whose metric \(g\) is \(K\) -contact and flow vector field \(X\) is contact, becomes a Ricci soliton with constant scalar curvature. In particular, for \(X\) strict, \(g\) becomes compact Sasakian Einstein.     

Cohomogeneity-two torus actions on non-negatively curved manifolds of low dimension

Let $\mathrm{M }^n,\, n \in \{4,5,6\}$ , be a compact, simply connected $n$ -manifold which admits some Riemannian metric with non-negative curvature and an isometry group of maximal possible rank. Then any smooth, effective action on $\mathrm{M }^n$ by a torus $\mathrm{T }^{n-2}$ is equivariantly diffeomorphic to an isometric action on a normal biquotient. Furthermore, it follows that any effective, isometric circle action on a compact, simply connected, non-negatively curved four-dimensional manifold is equivariantly diffeomorphic to an effective, isometric action on a normal biquotient.     

Rigidity of Einstein manifolds with positive scalar curvature

We prove that if $M^n(n\ge 4)$ is a compact Einstein manifold whose normalized scalar curvature and sectional curvature satisfy pinching condition $R_0>\sigma _{n}K_{\max }$ , where $\sigma _n\in (\frac{1}{4},1)$ is an explicit positive constant depending only on $n$ , then $M$ must be isometric to a spherical space form. Moreover, we prove that if an $n(\ge {\!\!4})$ -dimensional compact Einstein manifold satisfies $K_{\min }\ge \eta _n R_0,$ where $\eta _n\in (\frac{1}{4},1)$ is an explicit positive constant, then $M$ is locally symmetric. It should be emphasized that the pinching constant $\eta _n$ is optimal when $n$ is even. We then obtain some rigidity theorems for Einstein manifolds under $(n-2)$ -th Ricci curvature and normalized scalar curvature pinching conditions. Finally we extend the theorems above to Einstein submanifolds in a Riemannian manifold, and prove that if $M$ is an $n(\ge {\!\!4})$ -dimensional compact Einstein submanifold in the simply connected space form $F^{N}(c)$ with constant curvature $c\ge 0$ , and the normalized scalar curvature $R_0$ of $M$ satisfies $R_0>\frac{A_n}{A_n+4n-8}(c+H^2),$ where $A_n=n^3-5n^2+8n$ , and $H$ is the mean curvature of $M$ , then $M$ is isometric to a standard $n$ -sphere.     

Some properties of the Yamabe soliton and the related nonlinear elliptic equation

Firstly we prove the non-existence of positive radially symmetric solution of the nonlinear elliptic equation $\frac{n-1}{m}\Delta v^m+\alpha v+\beta x\cdot \nabla u=0$ in $\mathbb{R }^{n}$ when $n\ge 3$ , $0<m\le \frac{n-2}{n}$ , $\alpha <0$ and $\beta \le 0$ and prove various properties of the solution of the above elliptic equation for other parameter range of $\alpha $ and $\beta $ . Then these results are applied to prove some results on Yamabe solitons including the exact behaviour of the metric of the Yamabe soliton, its scalar curvature and sectional curvature, at infinity. A new proof of a result of Daskalopoulos and Sesum (The classification of locally conformally flat Yamabe solitons, http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.2242) on the positivity of the sectional curvature of Yamabe solitons is also presented.     

Complete gradient shrinking Ricci solitons with pinched curvature

We prove that any n-dimensional complete gradient shrinking Ricci soliton with pinched Weyl curvature is a finite quotient of ${\mathbb{R}^{n}, \mathbb{R}\times \mathbb{S}^{n-1}}$ or ${\mathbb{S}^{n}}$ . In particular, we do not need to assume the metric to be locally conformally flat.     

On stable hypersurfaces with vanishing scalar curvature

We will prove that there are no stable complete hypersurfaces of $\mathbb {R}^4$ with zero scalar curvature, polynomial volume growth and such that $\frac{(-K)}{H^3}\ge c>0$ everywhere, for some constant $c>0$ , where K denotes the Gauss-Kronecker curvature and $H$ denotes the mean curvature of the immersion. Our second result is the Bernstein type one there is no entire graphs of $\mathbb {R}^4$ with zero scalar curvature such that $\frac{(-K)}{H^3}\ge c>0$ everywhere. At last, it will be proved that, if there exists a stable hypersurface with zero scalar curvature and $\frac{(-K)}{H^3}\ge c>0$ everywhere, that is, with volume growth larger than polynomial growth of order four, then its tubular neighborhood is not embedded for suitable radius.     

Biharmonic PNMC submanifolds in spheres

We obtain several rigidity results for biharmonic submanifolds in $\mathbb{S}^{n}$ with parallel normalized mean curvature vector fields. We classify biharmonic submanifolds in $\mathbb{S}^{n}$ with parallel normalized mean curvature vector fields and with at most two distinct principal curvatures. In particular, we determine all biharmonic surfaces with parallel normalized mean curvature vector fields in $\mathbb{S}^{n}$ . Then we investigate, for (not necessarily compact) proper-biharmonic submanifolds in $\mathbb{S}^{n}$ , their type in the sense of B.-Y. Chen. We prove that (i) a proper-biharmonic submanifold in $\mathbb{S}^{n}$ is of 1-type or 2-type if and only if it has constant mean curvature f=1 or f∈(0,1), respectively; and (ii) there are no proper-biharmonic 3-type submanifolds with parallel normalized mean curvature vector fields in $\mathbb{S}^{n}$ .     

Ricci flow of homogeneous manifolds

We present in this paper a general approach to study the Ricci flow on homogeneous manifolds. Our main tool is a dynamical system defined on a subset $\mathcal H _{q,n}$ of the variety of $(q+n)$ -dimensional Lie algebras, parameterizing the space of all simply connected homogeneous spaces of dimension $n$ with a $q$ -dimensional isotropy, which is proved to be equivalent in a precise sense to the Ricci flow. The approach is useful to better visualize the possible (nonflat) pointed limits of Ricci flow solutions, under diverse rescalings, as well as to determine the type of the possible singularities. Ancient solutions arise naturally from the qualitative analysis of the evolution equation. We develop two examples in detail: a $2$ -parameter subspace of $\mathcal H _{1,3}$ reaching most of $3$ -dimensional geometries, and a $2$ -parameter family in $\mathcal H _{0,n}$ of left-invariant metrics on $n$ -dimensional compact and non-compact semisimple Lie groups.     

Sufficient conditions for Willmore immersions in \mathbb{R }^3 to be minimal surfaces

We provide two sharp sufficient conditions for immersed Willmore surfaces in $\mathbb{R }^3$ to be already minimal surfaces, i.e. to have vanishing mean curvature on their entire domains. These results turn out to be particularly suitable for applications to Willmore graphs. We can therefore show that Willmore graphs on bounded $C^4$ -domains $\overline{\varOmega }$ with vanishing mean curvature on the boundary $\partial \varOmega $ must already be minimal graphs, which in particular yields some Bernstein-type result for Willmore graphs on $\mathbb{R }^2$ . Our methods also prove the non-existence of Willmore graphs on bounded $C^4$ -domains $\overline{\varOmega }$ with mean curvature $H$ satisfying $H \ge c_0>0 \,{\text{ on }}\, \partial \varOmega $ if $\varOmega $ contains some closed disc of radius $\frac{1}{c_0} \in (0,\infty )$ , and they yield that any closed Willmore surface in $\mathbb{R }^3$ which can be represented as a smooth graph over $\mathbb{S }^2$ has to be a round sphere. Finally, we demonstrate that our results are sharp by means of an examination of some certain part of the Clifford torus in $\mathbb{R }^3$ .     

Boundedness of Generalized Riesz Transforms on Orlicz–Hardy Spaces Associated to Operators

Let ${\Phi}$ be a continuous, strictly increasing and concave function on (0, ∞) of critical lower type index ${p_\Phi^- \in(0,\,1]}$ . Let L be an injective operator of type ω having a bounded H _∞ functional calculus and satisfying the k-Davies–Gaffney estimates with ${k \in {\mathbb Z}_+}$ . In this paper, the authors first introduce an Orlicz–Hardy space ${H^{\Phi}_{L}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ in terms of the non-tangential L-adapted square function and then establish its molecular characterization. As applications, the authors prove that the generalized Riesz transform ${D_{\gamma}L^{-\delta/(2k)}}$ is bounded from the Orlicz–Hardy space ${H^{\Phi}_{L}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ to the Orlicz space ${L^{\widetilde{\Phi}}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ when ${p_\Phi^- \in (0, \frac{n}{n+ \delta - \gamma}]}$ , ${0 < \gamma \le \delta < \infty}$ and ${\delta- \gamma < n (\frac{1}{p_-(L)}-\frac{1}{p_+(L)})}$ , or from ${H^{\Phi}_{L}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ to the Orlicz–Hardy space ${H^{\widetilde \Phi}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ when ${p_\Phi^-\in (\frac{n}{n + \delta+ \lfloor \gamma \rfloor- \gamma},\,\frac{n}{n+ \delta- \gamma}]}$ , ${1\le \gamma \le \delta < \infty}$ and ${\delta- \gamma < n (\frac{1}{p_-(L)}-\frac{1}{p_+(L)})}$ , or from ${H^{\Phi}_{L}(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ to the weak Orlicz–Hardy space ${WH^\Phi(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ when ${\gamma = \delta}$ and ${p_\Phi=n/(n + \lfloor \gamma \rfloor)}$ or ${p_\Phi^-=n/(n + \lfloor \gamma \rfloor)}$ with ${p_\Phi^-}$ attainable, where ${\widetilde{\Phi}}$ is an Orlicz function whose inverse function ${\widetilde{\Phi}^{-1}}$ is defined by ${\widetilde{\Phi}^{-1}(t):=\Phi^{-1}(t)t^{\frac{1}{n}(\gamma- \delta)}}$ for all ${t \in (0,\,\infty)}$ , ${p_\Phi}$ denotes the strictly critical lower type index of ${\Phi}$ , ${\lfloor \gamma \rfloor}$ the maximal integer not more than ${\gamma}$ and ${(p_-(L),\,p_+(L))}$ the range of exponents ${p \in[1,\, \infty]}$ for which the semigroup ${\{e^{-tL}\}_{t >0 }}$ is bounded on ${L^p(\mathbb{R}^n)}$ .     

Existence of immersed spheres minimizing curvature functionals in compact 3-manifolds

We study curvature functionals for immersed 2-spheres in a compact, three-dimensional Riemannian manifold $M$ . Under the assumption that the sectional curvature $K^M$ is strictly positive, we prove the existence of a smooth immersion $f:{\mathbb {S}}^2 \rightarrow M$ minimizing the $L^2$ integral of the second fundamental form. Assuming instead that $K^M \le 2$ and that there is some point $\overline{x} \in M$ with scalar curvature $R^M(\overline{x}) > 6$ , we obtain a smooth minimizer $f:{\mathbb {S}}^2 \rightarrow M$ for the functional $\int \frac{1}{4}|H|^2+1$ , where $H$ is the mean curvature.     

The canonical shrinking soliton associated to a Ricci flow

To every Ricci flow on a manifold ${\mathcal{M}}$ over a time interval ${I\subset\mathbb{R}_-}$ , we associate a shrinking Ricci soliton on the space–time ${\mathcal{M}\times I}$ . We relate properties of the original Ricci flow to properties of the new higher-dimensional Ricci flow equipped with its own time-parameter. This geometric construction was discovered by consideration of the theory of optimal transportation, and in particular the results of the second author Topping (J Reine Angew Math 636:93–122, 2009), and McCann and the second author (Am J Math 132:711–730, 2010); we briefly survey the link between these subjects.     

Toric partial density functions and stability of toric varieties

Let $(L, h)\rightarrow (X, \omega )$ denote a polarized toric Kähler manifold. Fix a toric submanifold $Y$ and denote by $\hat{\rho }_{tk}:X\rightarrow \mathbb {R}$ the partial density function corresponding to the partial Bergman kernel projecting smooth sections of $L^k$ onto holomorphic sections of $L^k$ that vanish to order at least $tk$ along $Y$ , for fixed $t>0$ such that $tk\in \mathbb {N}$ . We prove the existence of a distributional expansion of $\hat{\rho }_{tk}$ as $k\rightarrow \infty $ , including the identification of the coefficient of $k^{n-1}$ as a distribution on $X$ . This expansion is used to give a direct proof that if $\omega $ has constant scalar curvature, then $(X, L)$ must be slope semi-stable with respect to $Y$ (cf. Ross and Thomas in J Differ Geom 72(3): 429–466, 2006). Similar results are also obtained for more general partial density functions. These results have analogous applications to the study of toric K-stability of toric varieties.     

Some Critical Almost Hermitian Structures

Let M be an even dimensional compact smooth manifold admitting an almost complex structure. Let ${{(\lambda, \mu)} \in \mathbb{R}^2 - (0,0)}$ . We discuss the critical points of the functional ${\mathcal {F}_{\lambda, \mu} (J, g) = \int_M (\lambda \tau + \mu \tau^* ) dv_g}$ on the space of all almost Hermitian structures ${\mathcal{AH}(M)}$ on M and its subspace ${{\mathcal{AH}_{c}(M)}}$ with a certain positive constant c, where τ and τ ^* are the scalar curvature and the *-scalar curvature of (J, g), respectively. Further, we provide some examples illustrating our arguments.     

Extension of a theorem of Shi and Tam

In this note, we prove the following generalization of a theorem of Shi and Tam (J Differ Geom 62:79–125, 2002): Let (Ω, g) be an n-dimensional (n ≥ 3) compact Riemannian manifold, spin when n?>?7, with non-negative scalar curvature and mean convex boundary. If every boundary component Σ _i has positive scalar curvature and embeds isometrically as a mean convex star-shaped hypersurface ${{\hat \Sigma}_i \subset \mathbb{R}^n}$ , then $$ \int\limits_{\Sigma_i} H \ d \sigma \le \int\limits_{{\hat \Sigma}_i} \hat{H} \ d {\hat \sigma} $$ where H is the mean curvature of Σ _i in (Ω, g), ${\hat{H}}$ is the Euclidean mean curvature of ${{\hat \Sigma}_i}$ in ${\mathbb{R}^n}$ , and where d σ and ${d {\hat \sigma}}$ denote the respective volume forms. Moreover, equality holds for some boundary component Σ _i if, and only if, (Ω, g) is isometric to a domain in ${\mathbb{R}^n}$ . In the proof, we make use of a foliation of the exterior of the ${\hat \Sigma_i}$ ’s in ${\mathbb{R}^n}$ by the ${\frac{H}{R}}$ -flow studied by Gerhardt (J Differ Geom 32:299–314, 1990) and Urbas (Math Z 205(3):355–372, 1990). We also carefully establish the rigidity statement in low dimensions without the spin assumption that was used in Shi and Tam (J Differ Geom 62:79–125, 2002).     

Some results on metric n-Lie algebras

We study the structure of a metric n-Lie algebra G over the complex field C. Let G = SR be the Levi decomposition, where R is the radical of G and S is a strong semisimple subalgebra of G. Denote by m(G) the number of all minimal ideals of an indecomposable metric n-Lie algebra and R ⊥ the orthogonal complement of R. We obtain the following results. As S-modules, R ⊥ is isomorphic to the dual module of G/R. The dimension of the vector space spanned by all nondegenerate invariant symmetric bilinear forms on G is equal to that of the vector space of certain linear transformations on G; this dimension is greater than or equal to m(G) + 1. The centralizer of R in G is equal to the sum of all minimal ideals; it is the direct sum of R ⊥ and the center of G. Finally, G has no strong semisimple ideals if and only if R⊥■R.     

Geodesic Ricci solitons on unit tangent sphere bundles

In the paper, (Abbassi and Kowalski, Ann Glob Anal Geom, 38: 11–20, 2010) the authors study Einstein Riemannian $g$ natural metrics on unit tangent sphere bundles. In this study, we equip the unit tangent sphere bundle $T_1 M$ of a Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$ with an arbitrary Riemannian $g$ natural metric $\tilde{G}$ and we show that if the geodesic flow $\tilde{\xi }$ is the potential vector field of a Ricci soliton $(\tilde{G},\tilde{\xi },\lambda )$ on $T_1M,$ then $(T_1M,\tilde{G})$ is Einstein. Moreover, we show that the Reeb vector field of a contact metric manifold is an infinitesimal harmonic transformation if and only if it is Killing. Thus, we consider a natural contact metric structure $(\tilde{G}, \tilde{\eta }, \tilde{\varphi }, \tilde{\xi })$ over $T_1 M$ and we show that the geodesic flow $\tilde{\xi }$ is an infinitesimal harmonic transformation if and only if the structure $(\tilde{G}, \tilde{\eta }, \tilde{\varphi },\tilde{\xi })$ is Sasaki $\eta $ -Einstein. Consequently, we get that $(\tilde{G},\tilde{\xi }, \lambda )$ is a Ricci soliton if and only if the structure $(\tilde{G}, \tilde{\eta }, \tilde{\varphi }, \tilde{\xi })$ is Sasaki-Einstein with $\lambda = 2(n-1) >0.$ This last result gives new examples of Sasaki–Einstein structures.     

Hypercentralizing generalized skew derivations on left ideals in prime rings

Let $\mathcal{R }$ be a prime ring of characteristic different from $2, \mathcal{Q }_r$ the right Martindale quotient ring of $\mathcal{R }, \mathcal{C }$ the extended centroid of $\mathcal{R }, \mathcal{I }$ a nonzero left ideal of $\mathcal{R }, F$ a nonzero generalized skew derivation of $\mathcal{R }$ with associated automorphism $\alpha $ , and $n,k \ge 1$ be fixed integers. If $[F(r^n),r^n]_k=0$ for all $r \in \mathcal{I }$ , then there exists $\lambda \in \mathcal{C }$ such that $F(x)=\lambda x$ , for all $x\in \mathcal{I }$ . More precisely one of the following holds: (1) $\alpha $ is an $X$ -inner automorphism of $\mathcal{R }$ and there exist $b,c \in \mathcal{Q }_r$ and $q$ invertible element of $\mathcal{Q }_r$ , such that $F(x)=bx-qxq^{-1}c$ , for all $x\in \mathcal{Q }_r$ . Moreover there exists $\gamma \in \mathcal{C }$ such that $\mathcal{I }(q^{-1}c-\gamma )=(0)$ and $b-\gamma q \in \mathcal{C }$ ; (2) $\alpha $ is an $X$ -outer automorphism of $\mathcal{R }$ and there exist $c \in \mathcal{Q }_r, \lambda \in \mathcal{C }$ , such that $F(x)=\lambda x-\alpha (x)c$ , for all $x\in \mathcal{Q }_r$ , with $\alpha (\mathcal{I })c=0$ .