Jost maps, ball-homogeneous and harmonic manifolds (Q1865284)

Let \((M,g)\) be a compact Riemannian manifold and \(\mu\) its volume element. For every \(x\in M\) and \(\varepsilon>0\) sufficiently small, let \(\mu_x^\varepsilon\) be the measure which coincides with \(\mu\) on the ball \(B(x,\varepsilon)\) of centre \(x\) and radius \(\varepsilon\) and vanishes outside \(B(x,\varepsilon)\). The authors consider those manifolds \((M,g)\) for which the identity map is an \(\varepsilon\)-equilibrium map with respect to the family \(\{\mu_x^\varepsilon\}\) (as defined by \textit{J. Jost} in [Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 2, 173-204 (1994; Zbl 0798.58021)]). Geometrically, this means that each point \(x\in M\) is the centre of mass for the measure \(\mu_x^\varepsilon\). The authors deduce several geometric properties for these manifolds. For example, such spaces are ball-homogeneous (i.e., the volume of a small geodesic ball \(B(x,\varepsilon)\) depends only on its radius, not on its centre) and hence have constant scalar curvature. Furthermore, a result on the Lie derivative of the volume density function is proved. If the Ricci curvature is bounded away from zero from below or from above, this implies in the analytic case that the manifold is locally and weakly harmonic. Finally, it is also shown that any compact manifold with volume-preserving geodesic symmetries (i.e., any compact d'Atri space) always satisfies the above condition. We point out that most of these results have appeared in earlier publications by the same authors [see Govaerts, Jan (ed.) et al., Contemporary problems in mathematical physics. Proceedings of the 1st international workshop, Cotonou, 1999. Singapore: World Scientific, 118-137 (2000; Zbl 0974.53026)] and the second author [Differ. Geom. Appl. 13, 119-128 (2000; Zbl 1001.53035)].