English

An interesting family of conformally invariant one-forms in even dimensions

Differential Geometry 2022-03-08 v2

Abstract

We construct a natural conformally invariant one-form of weight 2k-2k on any 2k2k-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifold which is closely related to the Pfaffian of the Weyl tensor. On oriented manifolds, we also construct natural conformally invariant one-forms of weight 4k-4k on any 4k4k-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifold which are closely related to top degree Pontrjagin forms. The weight of these forms implies that they define functionals on the space of conformal Killing fields. On Riemannian manifolds, we show that this functional is trivial for the former form but not for the latter forms. As a consequence, we obtain global obstructions to the existence of an Einstein metric in a given conformal class.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.01762,
  title  = {An interesting family of conformally invariant one-forms in even dimensions},
  author = {Jeffrey S. Case},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.01762},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Corrected and improved statement of Proposition 6.1; corrected minor typos. 14 pages. Final version