Riemannian manifold in which the skew-symmetric curvature operator has pointwise constant eigenvalues (Q1388154)
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English | Riemannian manifold in which the skew-symmetric curvature operator has pointwise constant eigenvalues |
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Riemannian manifold in which the skew-symmetric curvature operator has pointwise constant eigenvalues (English)
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4 January 1999
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Let \((M,g)\) be a Riemannian manifold and denote by \(R\) its associated Riemannian curvature tensor. Let \(p\) be a point of \(M\) and consider the two-dimensional subspace of \(T_pM\) determined by the two orthonormal tangent vectors \(u, v\). Then the curvature operator \(R_{uv}\) is skew-symmetric and depends only on the two-plane and the orientation of the orthonormal basis \((u,v)\). In this paper, the authors derive a classification of the four-dimensional manifolds for which the eigenvalues of this operator are independent of the two-plane at \(p\), i.e., are pointwise constant. They show that such manifolds are almost everywhere locally isometric to a real space form or a warped product \(I\times_f N\) where \(I\) is an open interval of \(\mathbb{R}\), \(N\) is a space of constant curvature \(k\) and \(f^2= kt^2+ Ct+ D\), \(t\in I\), where \(C\) and \(D\) are constants such that \(C^2- 4kD\neq 0\). Moreover, the eigenvalues are globally constant on a connected manifold \(M\) if and only if \((M,g)\) is a real space form. The authors also treat the three-dimensional case. Here the results are different and a complete classification is not yet known. \textit{P. B. Gilkey, J. V. Leahy} and \textit{H. Sadofsky} [`Riemannian manifolds whose skew-symmetric curvature operator has constant eigenvalues' (Preprint; http://hopf.uoregon.edu/\(\sim\)gilkey/dirresearch/prepap.html)] announced a generalization of the four-dimensional results to all other dimensions except for dimensions 7 and 8.
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4-manifolds
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3-manifolds
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classification
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pointwise constant eigenvalues
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skew-symmetric curvature operator
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