A new variational characterization of -dimensional space forms

A Riemannian manifold is associated with a Schouten -tensor which is a naturally defined Codazzi tensor in case is a locally conformally flat Riemannian manifold. In this paper, we study the Riemannian functional defined on , where is the space of smooth Riemannian metrics on a compact smooth manifold and is the elementary symmetric functions of the eigenvalues of with respect to . We prove that if and a conformally flat metric is a critical point of with , then must have constant sectional curvature. This is a generalization of Gursky and Viaclovsky's very recent theorem that the critical point of with characterized the three-dimensional space forms.