Self-duality and 4-manifolds with nonnegative curvature on totally isotropic 2-planes (Q1325795)

Micallef and Moore have introduced the notion of a Riemannian manifold with positive curvature on totally isotropic 2-planes, and they proved that any compact simply connected manifold which admits such a metric is homeomorphic to a sphere -- a variant of the famous Sphere Theorem. In this paper the author studies the extremal case of manifolds with nonnegative curvature on totally isotropic 2-planes (NNC), in the particular case of dimension 4. This dimension is special because the questions can be attacked using harmonic 2-forms, rather than the more involved arguments with harmonic 2-spheres used by Micallef and Moore. The condition NNC, in 4 dimensions, is equivalent to \(S/6 - W \geq 0\), where \(S\) is the scalar curvature and \(W\) is the Weyl curvature, regarded as an operator on 2-forms. The same combination occurs in the Weitzenböck formula for 2-forms: \[ \Delta \omega = \nabla^* \nabla\omega + (S/6 - W)\omega. \] It follows that on any compact 4- manifold with NNC each harmonic 2-form is parallel. The author deduces that, if the manifold is simply connected and not homeomorphic to a sphere it must be diffeomorphic to \(\mathbb{C} \mathbb{P}^ 2\). The other results in the paper bear on half-conformally flat manifolds. The author classifies compact half-conformally flat manifolds with non-negative Ricci curvature. Using a theorem of Cheeger and Gromoll, the author deduces that either the fundamental group of such a manifold is finite or the manifold is covered by \(\mathbb{R}^ 4\) or \(S^ 3 \times \mathbb{R}\). From this it is deduced that the only examples are either conformally flat, or K3 surfaces, or finite quotients of manifolds homeomorphic to connected sums of \(\mathbb{C} \mathbb{P}^ 2\).