Elementary construction of exhausting subsolutions of elliptic operators (Q2565964)

A noncompact Riemannian manifold admits a \(C^\infty\) strictly subharmonic exhausting function as it follows by a theorem due to \textit{R. E. Greene} and {H. Wu} [Ann. Inst. Fourier 25, No. 1, 215--235 (1975; Zbl 0307.31003)]. An elementary proof of this fact is given by \textit{J.-P. Demailly} [Math. Z. 204, No. 2, 283--295 (1990; Zbl 0682.32017)]. In the paper under review, the authors propose a further simplification of Demailly's proof and describe some, mostly known, applications. These include for instance, the fact that the holomorphic line bundle associated to a nontrivial effective divisor on a compact connected complex manifold admits a \(C^\infty\) Hermitian metric with positive scalar curvature.