On the topology of closed manifolds with quasi-constant sectional curvature (Q2423204)

The aim of this paper is to describe the topology of a family of conformally flat manifolds admitting a local vector field (not a conformal Killing field in general) with respect to which the curvature is quasi-constant. The author proves that closed manifolds admitting a generic metric with sectional curvature locally-constant are graphs of space forms. ``A space form is a compact Riemannian manifold with constant sectional curvature. A graph of space forms is a closed manifold \(M\) which can be obtained from a finite set of compact space forms with totally umbilical boundary components by gluing isometrically interval bundles (twisted cylinders) along boundary components. The pieces will be accordingly called vertex manifolds and edge manifolds or tubes.'' For more generic QC spaces (the sets of isotropic points are arbitrary), under suitable positivity assumption and torsion-free fundamental groups, they are still diffeomorphic to connected sums of spherical bundles over the circle. The first result is a general description of the topology of the locally 1-QC spaces under a mild genericity condition (Theorem 1.6, proved in Section 3). The second result is an extension to the case of 1-QC manifold under additional hypotheses (Theorem 1.8, proved in Section 4). The paper concludes with ``More about the equivariant immersions of 1-QC manifolds'' in which the author completes the description of isometric immersion of 1-QC conformally flat manifolds for dimension \(n=3\) and proves that a 1-QC metric admits an extension to a hyperbolic metric on the product \(M \times [0, \infty]\) (Proposition 5.3).