Balanced Hermitian structures on almost abelian Lie algebras

We study balanced Hermitian structures on almost abelian Lie algebras, i.e. on Lie algebras with a codimension-one abelian ideal. In particular, we classify six-dimensional almost abelian Lie algebras which carry a balanced structure. It has been conjectured by A. Fino and L. Vezzoni that a compact complex manifold admitting both a balanced metric and a SKT metric necessarily has a K\"ahler metric: we prove this conjecture for compact almost abelian solvmanifolds with left-invariant complex structures. Moreover, we investigate the behaviour of the flow of balanced metrics introduced by L. Bedulli and L. Vezzoni and of the anomaly flow by D. H. Phong, S. Picard and X. Zhang on almost abelian Lie groups. In particular, we show that the anomaly flow preserves the balanced condition and that locally conformally K\"ahler metrics are fixed points.