Twists versus modifications (Q323687)

In this paper, the author studies the relationship between two ways of constructing new interesting manifolds out of old hyper-Kähler ones: the \textit{twist method} and the \textit{modification method}. Hyper-Kähler manifolds are Ricci-flat Riemannian manifolds carrying a triple of parallel complex structures. Therefore constructing new examples is important. A possibility is to start with an old example and somehow deform it into a new one. In case of hyper-Kähler manifolds there are two ways of doing this, the twist method (related to geometric \(T\)-duality) and the modification method (related to the hyper-Kähler moment map construction), having their own advantages and disadvantages: The twist method tends to destroy the hyper-Kähler condition but is invertible while modification obeys this condition but has no obvious inverse. In this paper the author develops the technique of \textit{elementary deformations} and establishes a link between the two methods (see Sections 4 and 5 in the paper). This allows one to control the hyper-Kähler condition as well as to obtain strong HKT metrics. The paper also contains a classification of all \(4\)-dimensional complete hyper-Kähler manifolds with tri-Hamiltonian symmetry.