First Pontrjagin form, rigidity and strong rigidity of nonpositively curved Kähler surface of general type (Q1909540)

From the viewpoint of the attempts to generalize the famous uniformization theorem to manifolds of complex dimension at least 2, much remains to be done for negatively curved manifolds, while positively curved Kähler manifolds are better understood via the resolution of the Frankel conjecture; see IV of Appendix in [\textit{N. Mok}, Metric rigidity theorems on Hermitian locally symmetric spaces, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci USA 83, 2288-2290 (1986; Zbl 0593.53034)] for further details. Along similar lines the present author proves two main results for negatively curved surfaces. He observes first of all that a compact Kähler surface \((M,g)\) of nonpositive sectional curvature would satisfy \(P_1 \equiv C^2_1 - 2C_2 \geq 0\) at the level of forms everywhere. Then he derives the first main result that if such an \(M\) is assumed to have the Pontryagin number \(p_1 = 0\) (and a technical assumption on the Ricci curvature), then the universal covering space of \((M,g)\) is biholomorphically isometric to the bidisc \(D \times D\) equipped with a product metric (of nonpositive sectional curvature). We note that \(M\) is said to be strongly rigid, if any compact complex surface homotopically equivalent to \(M\) must be biholomorphic or anti-biholomorphic to \(M\). His second result concerns the above strong rigidity property: Let \((M,g)\) be a compact Kähler surface of general type with non-positive sectional curvature, if \(p_1 > 0\), then \(M\) is strongly rigid. For such surfaces he observes that the bisectional curvature of \(M\) has to be negative definite at some point (and nonpositive everywhere). He deforms the homotopy equivalence to a harmonic map \(f\) and applies the Bochner-Kodaira formula of Siu for a further study of \(f\) to conclude that \(f\) is either biholomorphic or anti-biholomorphic.