Affine spheres and Kähler-Einstein metrics. (Q1864709)

The author investigates a natural correspondence between Hessian metrics \(g\) on convex cones \(C\) and centroaffine metrics \(h\) on hypersurfaces \(H\) asymptotic to the boundary of the cone. The correspondence is as follows: \(H\) is the level set of a positive homogeneous function \(s\) of degree \(p>0\) on \(C\), \(g\) is the Hessian of \(-\log s\) and \(h\) is the second fundamental form of \(H\) with respect to the position vector field. The Koszul-Vinberg metric and the Cheng-Yau metric provide examples of such metrics \(g\). Both are invariant under the linear automorphisms of the cone and are defined by a function \(s\) homogeneous of degree \(n+1\). The first theorem (splitting theorem) states that \((C,g)\) is a Riemannian product of \((H,ph)\) with a line. Apparently, the author has overlooked that this result was proven in [\textit{V. Cortés}, Transform. Groups 1, 337--373 (1996; Zbl 0871.53039), Proposition 1.1]. In the latter paper the result is needed and stated only for a homogeneous polynomial \(s\) but the proof remains valid for any homogeneous function. The main results are two interesting applications of the splitting theorem. The first concerns locally projectively flat manifolds \(M\) admitting a certain kind of complete Riemannian metric \(h\), which is a global version of the centroaffine metric \(h\) considered above. In the global setting, \(s\) is a global section of the tautological bundle rather than a function. The result is that any such manifold \((M,h)\) is projectively equivalent to a quotient of a convex bounded domain by a discrete properly discontinuous group of projective transformations. This extends a previous result of the author from the case where \((M,h)\) is compact to the case where \((M,h)\) is only complete. The key idea of the proof is the following. By the above correspondence and the splitting theorem, one can associate a complete Hessian manifold \((C(M),g)\) to \((M,h)\). The universal covering of \((C(M),g)\) is a (conical) convex domain \(C\), by \textit{H. Shima} and \textit{K. Yagi} [ Differ. Geom. Appl. 7, 277--290 (1997; Zbl 0910.53034)]. The projective image of \(C\) is a convex bounded domain, which is identified with the universal covering of \(M\). The second application of the splitting theorem is to the Cheng-Yau metric \(g\) on the cone \(C\) over a convex bounded domain. The corresponding hypersurface \((H,h)\) is a hyperbolic affine hypersphere. Recall that the Cheng-Yau metric is the restriction of the Kähler-Einstein metric on the tube domain associated to the convex cone \(C\), which explains the title of the paper.