Curvatures of moduli space of curves and applications (Q1693281)

The authors study the curvature properties of the Weil-Petersson metric on the moduli space of curves. The first result, Theorem 1.1, studies the relations between a list of curvature properties for a Kähler metric and its background Riemannian metric: semi dual-Nakano-negative, non-positive Riemannian curvature operator, strongly non-positive in the sense of Siu, non-positive complex sectional curvature, non-positive Riemannian sectional curvature, non-positive holomorphic bisectional curvature, non-positive isotropic curvature. The second result, Theorem 1.2, shows that the moduli space \((\mathcal M_g, \omega_{WP})\) of curves with genus \(g>1\) with the Weil-Petersson metric has the strongest curvature properties: its curvature is dual Nakano-negative and semi-Nakano-negative (whence it also has the other curvature properties listed above). Here, one takes advantage of the curvature formula of direct image sheaves, and of an adaptation of the methods in [\textit{K. Liu} et al., Publ. Res. Inst. Math. Sci. 44, No. 2, 699--724 (2008; Zbl 1219.14012)]. The theorem generalizes a result in [\textit{Y. Wu}, J. Differ. Geom. 96, No. 3, 507--530 (2014; Zbl 1295.30103)]. As an application of the curvature properties of \((\mathcal M_g, \omega_{WP})\), the authors prove in Theorem 1.4 that any submanifold in \(\mathcal M_g\) which is totally geodesic in \(\mathcal A_g\) (the moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension \(g\)) with finite volume must be a ball quotient. In particular, there is no higher-rank locally symmetric space in \(\mathcal M_g\), Corollary 1.6. This provides a differential geometric approach to the \textit{F. Oort} conjecture in [``Some questions in algebraic geometry'', Preprint (1995)].