Conformal Killing forms on nearly Kähler manifolds (Q2176113)

If \((M, g, J)\) is an almost Hermitian manifold, then it is known that the fundamental 2-form \(\omega\) on \(M\) is defined by \(\omega(X, Y) =g(JX, Y)\) for tangent vectors \(X, Y\). An almost Hermitian manifold \((M, g, J)\) is said to be a nearly Kähler manifold if \(\omega\) is a Killing 2-form, that is \(\omega\) satisfies \(X \lrcorner \nabla_X\omega=0\) for every tangent vector \(X\), where \(\lrcorner\) denotes the operator dual to the wedge product. Moreover, a nearly Kähler manifold is said to be strict if \(\nabla_X J\neq0\) for every \(X\neq0\). This article is devoted to the investigation of conformal Killing forms on compact 6-dimensional strict nearly Kähler manifolds. Recall that a conformal Killing form of rank \(p\) on a Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) is a \(p\)-form \(\omega\) which satisfies: \[ \nabla_X\omega=\frac{1}{p+1}X \lrcorner d\omega-\frac{1}{n-p+1}X^*\wedge d^*\omega \] for any vector field \(X\) on \(M\), where \(\nabla\) is the Levi-Civita connection of \(g\), \(n\) is the dimension of \(M\), \(X^*\) is the 1-form dual to the vector field \(X\) with respect to the metric \(g\) and \(d^*\) is the adjoint of the exterior derivative \(d\). It is known that in dimension 6, nearly Kähler manifolds are Einstein and the metric cone has holonomy \(G_2\). Moreover, \(*\omega\) and \(*d\omega\) are conformal Killing forms, as \(\omega\) and \(d\omega\) are conformal Killing forms and the Hodge \(*\)-operator preserves the space of these forms. In the main result, it is stated that there are no other examples of conformal Killing 3-forms of compact 6-dimensional strict nearly Kähler manifolds, apart from the linear combinations of \(d\omega\) and \(*d\omega\). This is a nice result whose proof is based on a fundamental integrability condition for conformal Killing forms related to the fact that such forms are components of a parallel section in the prolongation bundle. This integrability condition cannot be applied in the case of conformal Killing 2-forms, but the authors obtain some partial results, showing the non-existence of Killing 2-forms of some special type. Finally, they conjecture that a Killing 2-form on a compact 6-dimensional strict nearly Kähler manifold has to be a scalar multiple of the fundamental 2-form.