Dirac eigenvalues and total scalar curvature (Q1973420)

The aim of the article is to show that a recent conjecture of Friedrich and Kim (1999) fails. They conjectured that the eigenvalue of a closed Riemannian spin manifold \(M\) of dimension \(n\geq 3\) can be estimated from below by the total scalar curvature \[ \lambda^2\geq {n\over 4(n-1)}\cdot {1\over \text{vol}(M)} \cdot\int_MR. \tag{*} \] For a closed Riemannian spin manifold \((M,g)\) we denote by \(\lambda_k(g)\) the eigenvalue of the Dirac operator associated to \(g\), ordered by the magnitude of its modulus. In this paper it is shown that for a closed spin manifold \(M\) of dimension \(n\geq 3\) there exist constants \(0<C_1\leq C_2\leq C_3\leq\dots\) and a set of Riemannian metrics \(P\) on \(M\) such that \[ \lambda^2_k (g)\leq C_k\text{ for all }k\text{ and for all }g \in P \] and \[ \sup_{g\in P} {1\over \text{vol}_g (M)}\cdot \int_MR_g= \infty. \] This shows that an estimate of the type (*) is impossible.