The Poisson equation on complete manifolds with positive spectrum and applications (Q1043493)

In the interesting paper under review the authors investigate the existence of a solution to the Poisson equation on complete manifolds with positive spectrum and Ricci curvature bounded from below. It is shown that if a function \(f\) has decays as \(O(r ^{- 1 - \varepsilon} )\) for some \(\varepsilon >0,\) where \(r\) is the distance function to a fixed point, then the Poisson equation \(\Delta u=f\) has a solution \(u\) with at most exponential growth. The result is applied to the Poisson equation in order to study the existence of harmonic maps between complete manifolds and also existence of Hermitian--Einstein metrics on holomorphic vector bundles over complete manifolds. Moreover, assuming that the manifold is simply connected and of Ricci curvature between two negative constants, the authors prove that in fact the Poisson equation has a bounded solution and apply that result to the Ricci flow on complete surfaces.