Bach-flat Kähler surfaces (Q2187684)

On a smooth connected compact 4-manifold \(M\), the Weyl functional quantifies the deviation of a Riemannian metric g from local conformal flatness. Critical metrics of the Weyl functional are said to be Bach-flat. Every 4-dimensional conformally Einstein metric is Bach-flat, as is every anti-self dual metric. The main result is the following: Let \((M^4, g, J)\) be a compact connected Bach-flat Kähler surface. Then \(g\) is either anti-self-dual or else is conformally Einstein on an open dense subset of \(M\). This enables a classification scheme. The metrics so as the corresponding surfaces that admit then are explained. The work starts with a review of some key background facts that will help set the stage for our main results. Then the basic trichotomy of solutions is developed to prove the main theorem and to study the surfaces obtained in the classification. The article then concludes by proving some additional results about specific types of solutions, with a particular focus on interesting open problems.