On a conformal Gauss-Bonnet-Chern inequality for LCF manifolds and related topics (Q2486971)

If \((M, g)\) is a Riemannian manifold of even dimension \(n=2m\) and \([g]\) is the conformal class determined by \(g\), then there exist local curvatures \(Q_{2k}\) (with \(2k \leq\dim M\)) which satisfy certain conformal transformation laws when the Riemannian metric varies in the class \([g]\). \(Q_{n}\) is the most important local curvature. Suppose \(M\) is a locally conformally flat (LCF) manifold. Then \(Q_{n}\) is a multiple of the Pfaffian of the metric modulo a divergence term. Moreover, when \(M\) is compact without boundary, the Gauss-Bonnet-Chern theorem gives \(\int_{M} Q_{g}dv_{g}=\text{Euler} (M) \cdot ((n-2)!!)^2 \cdot | S^{n-1}| \), where Euler\((M)\) denotes the Euler Charateristic of \(M\) and \(| S^{n-1}| \) is the volume of the standard \((n-1)\)-sphere of radius 1. This formula is extended to certain complete LCF manifolds. The main result is: Let \(M,g\) be a complete LCF manifold with finitely many conformally flat simple ends satsfying \(\int_{M}| Q_{g}| dv < \infty\). If near the ends, the scalar curvature \(R_{g}\) is non-negative, then \(\int_{M} Q_{g}dv_{g}\leq \text{Euler} (M) \cdot ((n-2)!!)^2 \cdot | S^{n-1}| \). Furthermore, the author proves the following important result: If \(\Omega\) is a simply connected 4-manifold with a complete LCF metric, \(C\) and \(C'\) are constants such that \(C \geq R_{g} \geq C'>0, \text{Ric}_{g}\geq -Cg\) and \(\int_{\Omega}| \text{Pfaff}_{g}| dv_{g}<\infty\), then \(\Omega = S^{4}\setminus \{p_{1},\dots,p_{k}\}\) for some \(p_{i}\in S^{4} (i=1,2,\dots,k)\). This result is a fully non-linear analogue of the Chang-Qing-Yang theorem for dimension four.