Prescribing the mixed scalar curvature of a foliated Riemann-Cartan manifold (Q1704621)

The paper under review studies the geometry of Riemann-Cartan manifolds (RC) endowed with a regular foliation \(\mathcal{D}\). Recall that an RC manifold is a Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) where the Levi-Civita connection \(\nabla\) is replaced by an asymmetric connection \(\overline{\nabla} = \nabla + \mathcal{T}\). In the presence of a foliation, a curvature invariant is the \textit{mixed scalar curvature} \(\overline{S}_{\mathrm{mix}}\), namely the averaged sectional curvature over all planes formed by vectors tangent to leaves and vectors normal to leaves. In particular, the authors consider the problem of prescribing \(\overline{S}_{\mathrm{mix}}\) of a foliated RC manifold by conformal change of the RC structure on both the \(\mathcal{D}\) and the \(\mathcal{D}^{\perp}\) directions. They observe that the conformal factor involved obeys a leafwise elliptic equation. Given the difficulty with handling elliptic operators on the space of leaves (one needs to make use of the holonomy groupoid for this), the authors restrict to the following cases: {\parindent=0.7cm\begin{itemize}\item[1.] the foliation has a compact leaf and \(\overline{S}_{\mathrm{mix}}\) is constant on it; \item[2.] \(\mathcal{D}\) is a fibration and \(\overline{S}_{\mathrm{mix}}\) is constant on each fiber. \end{itemize}} The main tool used to find stable solutions of the elliptic equation (which are stable stationary solutions of the associated parabolic equation), is the spectral properties of the Schrödinger operator on a compact manifold. (In other words the non-linear heat equation.)