Surgery, curvature, and minimal volume (Q1888174)

The paper under review deals with Riemannian manifolds \(X\) admitting a metric such that \(aK+s>c\), where \(K\) is the sectional curvature, \(s\) the scalar curvature, \(a\) a nonnegative constant and \(c\) a constant. The author shows that any manifold obtained from \(X\) by surgeries of codimension \(\geq 3\) has the above property. By using a cobordism argument, the existence of such metrics on certain compact simply connected manifolds of dimension 5 is proved. The same is true for connected sum along embedded spheres with trivial normal bundles in codimension \(\geq 3\). The author also studies the corresponding minimal volume problem. One derives that every compact simply connected manifold of dimension 5 and every compact complex surface of Kodaira dimension 1 whose minimal model is not of class VII has \(aK+s\) bounded from below.