Certain conformal-like infinitesimal symmetries and the curvature of a compact Riemannian manifold (Q550433)

The notions of orthogonally conformal and orthogonally Killing vector fields are introduced. A motivation is the behavior of the unit vector field tangent to the parallels of a surface of revolution. The flow of such field induces an isometry on its orthogonal complement at any point, but the field is Killing if and only if the surface is a cylinder. This is an example of an orthogonally Killing vector field. More precisely, a vector field \(Z\) on a Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) is orthogonally conformal if it is a unit vector field satisfying \((\mathcal L_Z g)(U,V)=2\rho g(U,V)\) for all \(U,V\perp Z\), where \(\mathcal L_Z g\) denotes the Lie derivative of \(g\) with respect to \(Z\). An orthogonally Killing field is one that satisfies the above with \(\rho=0\). The existence of such a field is related to a certain curvature property, in the same spirit as the classic Bochner's technique. Namely, it is proven that, if a compact Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) of dimension \(\geq3\) admits an orthogonally conformal vector field \(Z\), then \(\int_M \mathrm{Ric}(Z,Z)\geq0\), and equality holds if and only if \(\nabla_U Z=0\) for any \(U\perp Z\), in which case \(Z\) is orthogonally Killing. As a corollary, if a compact Einstein manifold of dimension \(\geq3\) with \(\mathrm{Ric}=\lambda g\) admits an orthogonally conformal vector field, then \(\lambda>0\). Another corollary is that, if a compact Riemannian manifold has Ricci tensor negative semi-definite everywhere and negative-definite at a point, then it does not admit orthogonally conformal vector fields. The proofs of these results are very simple and elegant, and multiple examples are given to illustrate the above concepts.