Curvature strict positivity of direct image bundles associated to pseudoconvex families of domains

Abstract

We consider the curvature strict positivity of the direct image bundle associated to a pseudoconvex family of bounded domains. The main result is that the curvature of the direct image bundle associated to a strictly pseudoconvex family of bounded circular domains or Reinhardut domains are strictly positive in the sense of Nakano, even if the weight functions are not strictly plurisubharmonic. This result gives a new geometric insight about the property of strict pseudoconvexity, and has some applications in complex analysis and convex analysis. We investigate that the main result implies a remarkable result of Berndtsson which states that, for an ample vector bundle $E$ over a compact complex manifold $X$ and any $k\geq 0$, the bundle $S^kE\otimes\det E$ admits a Hermitian metric whose curvature is strictly positive in the sense of Nakano, where $S^kE$ is the $k$-th symmetric product of $E$. The two main ingredients in the argument of the main theorems are Berndtsson's estimate of the lower bound of curvature of direct image bundles and Deng-Ning-Wang-Zhou's characterization of the curvature Nakano positivity of Hermitian vector bundles in terms of $L^2$-estimate of $\bar\partial$.