Structure of homogeneous Ricci solitons and the Alekseevskii conjecture (Q2509584)

A major open question on homogeneous Einstein manifolds is known as Alekseevskii's conjecture, namely: Any connected homogeneous Einstein manifold of negative scalar curvature is diffeomorphic to an Euclidean space. All known examples are isometric to a left-invariant metric on a simply connected solvable Lie group. This happens also for the broader class of homogeneous expanding Ricci solitons, i.e., such that \(\mathrm{Ric}(g) = cg + L_X g\) for some \(c < 0\) and vector field \(X\). In the literature such examples are called solvsolitons (nilsolitons in the nilpotent case) and are defined by having their Ricci operators equal to a scalar multiple of the identity plus a derivation of the corresponding solvable Lie algebra. In the paper under review, the authors make significant progress towards Alekseevskii's conjecture, proving structural results which are actually valid for any homogeneous expanding Ricci soliton, and generalize many well-known results on Einstein solvmanifolds, solvsolitons, and nilsolitons. As a main result they show that any homogeneous expanding Ricci soliton \(M = G/K\) is diffeomorphic to a product \(U/K \times N\), where \(U\) is a maximal reductive Lie subgroup of \(G\) and \(N\) is the maximal nilpotent normal subgroup of \(G\), such that the metric restricted to N is a nilsoliton. Moreover, they prove that strong compatibility conditions between the metric and the action of \(U\) on \(N\) by conjugation must hold, including a nice formula for the Ricci operator of the metric restricted to \(U/K\). To prove the theorem the authors use strong results from geometric invariant theory. As an application, they obtain many Lie theoretical characterizations of algebraic solitons, as well as a proof of the fact that the following a priori much stronger result is actually equivalent to Alekseevskii's conjecture: Any expanding algebraic soliton is diffeomorphic to a Euclidean space.