arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Matthew J. Gursky.
We formulate natural conformally invariant conditions on a 4-manifold for the existence of a metric whose Schouten tensor satisfies a quadratic inequality. This inequality implies that the eigenvalues of the Ricci tensor are positively pinched.
In this paper we provide a sharp characterization of the smooth four-dimensional sphere. The assumptions of the theorem are conformally invariant, and can be reduced to an L^2 inequality of the Weyl tensor and positivity of the Yamabe invariant.
The Yamabe Invariant of a smooth compact manifold is by definition the supremum of the scalar curvatures of unit-volume Yamabe metrics on the manifold. For an explicit infinite class of 4-manifolds, we show that this invariant is positive but strictly less than that of the 4-sphere. This is done by using spin^c Dirac operators to control the lowest eigenvalue of a perturbation of the Yamabe Laplacian. These results dovetail perfectly with those derived from the perturbed Seiberg-Witten equations, but the present method is much more elementary in spirit.