A note on the almost-one-half holomorphic pinching (Q1677885)

The authors study compact Kähler manifolds with positive holomorphic sectional curvature. They provide a rigidity result when the holomorphic sectional curvature is almost-one-half pinched. Let \((M,J,g)\) be a compact Kähler manifold, and consider its holomorphic sectional curvature \(H\), namely, the Riemannian sectional curvature restricted on any \(J\)-invariant real \(2\)-plane. The authors consider the case \(H>0\): by Yau, it is conjectured that \(M\) is then projective and rationally connected, see recent work in [\textit{X. Yang}, ``RC-positivity, rational connectedness and Yau's conjecture'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1708.06713}]. They use local and global holomorphic pinching constants to study the complexity of rational varieties that admit Kähler metrics with \(H>0\). Motivated by a previous result in [\textit{B. Yang} and \textit{F. Zheng}, ``Hirzebruch manifolds and positive holomorphic sectional curvature'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1611.06571}], they prove the following (Theorem 1.1): For any complex dimension \(n\geq2\), there exists a positive constant \(\epsilon(n)\) such that any compact Kähler \(n\)-dimensional manifold with \(\frac{1}{2}-\epsilon\leq H \leq 1\) is biholomorphic to either \(\mathbb{CP}^n\), or \(\mathbb{CP}^k\times\mathbb{CP}^{n-k}\), or an irreducible rank-\(2\) compact Hermitian symmetric space. The proof is motivated by the work [\textit{P. Petersen} and \textit{T. Tao}, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 137, No. 7, 2437--2440 (2009; Zbl 1168.53020)] and uses the Kähler-Ricci flow.