Weyl-parallel forms, conformal products and Einstein-Weyl manifolds (Q428177)

Let \(M\) be a smooth manifold of dimension \(n\geq 3\) endowed with an equivalence class of conformally related Riemannian metrics. Recall that there is a natural class of torsion free connections compatible with the conformal structure which are called Weyl connections. Among these are connections which locally (respectively globally) coincide with the Levi-Civita connection of one of the metrics in the conformal class, called closed (respectively exact) Weyl connections. Following earlier work on similar problems for spinors, the aim of the article is to determine those conformal structures which admit a non-zero differential form which is parallel for one of the Weyl connections. If the Weyl connection under consideration is closed, then this boils down to a question on the holonomy of the corresponding Riemannian metric, which can be solved using the classification of Riemannian holonomy groups. A second case, that has to be treated separately, is that of two-forms in dimension four, whose associated endomorphism is an almost complex structure. Again, this can be solved using known results. The third possibility, which is the main topic of the article, is the case of a conformal product. The notion of a conformal product of two manifolds endowed with conformal structures is introduced in the article as a conformal structure on the product manifold such that the projections on the two factors are orthogonal conformal submersions (i.e., each tangent map is conformal on the ortho-complement of its kernel). This condition does not pin down the conformal structure on the product space uniquely, so there is a family of conformal products. The article studies basic properties of conformal products, in particular showing that representations as a conformal product are in bijective correspondence with Weyl connections with reducible holonomy. Weyl parallel forms are then obtained from volume forms on the factors of a conformal product and the corresponding Weyl connection always turns out to be the canonical one. In a final section, the results of the article are applied to the study of \(4\)-dimensional Einstein-Weyl structures.