Einstein solvmanifolds are standard

We study Einstein manifolds admitting a transitive solvable Lie group of isometries (solvmanifolds). It is conjectured that these exhaust the class of noncompact homogeneous Einstein manifolds. J. Heber has showed that under certain simple algebraic condition called standard (i.e. the orthogonal complement of the derived algebra is abelian), Einstein solvmanifolds have many remarkable structural and uniqueness properties. In this paper, we prove that any Einstein solvmanifold is standard, by applying a stratification procedure from geometric invariant theory due to F. Kirwan.