Einstein metrics on principal torus bundles (Q582602)

A Riemannian metric with constant Ricci curvature is called Einstein. Clearly, the Riemannian product of two Einstein metrics is again Einstein, if the Ricci curvatures are the same. A generalization of this is the construction of Einstein metrics on a principal bundle \(G\to p\to M\). Metrics on G and M together with a connection on P determine a metric on the total space P. This is Einstein iff the connection is Yang-Mills and Ricci tensors on G and M satisfy certain equations involving the curvature of the connection. If G is Abelian, the Yang-Mills condition is reduced to harmonicity of the connection form. Such a construction was done first by Kobayashi on circle bundles P over Kähler-Einstein manifolds M with positive Ricci curvature such that the Euler class of P is a positive rational multiple of the first Chern class of M. The present paper generalizes this result in two ways. As base space, the authors use a product \(M=M_ 1\times...\times M_ m\) of Kähler- Einstein manifolds with positive Ricci curvature. They show that in this case, for suitable scaling of the metric on the factors, much more principal circle bundles over M carry an Einstein metric, namely those whose Euler class is a rational linear combination of the first Chern classes of the \(M_ i\). In a second step, the circle is replaced with an r-dimensional torus for \(r\leq m\). So they obtain large new families of topologically and geometrically interesting Einstein manifolds. The particular case of circle bundles over \({\mathbb{C}}P^ p\times {\mathbb{C}}P^ q\) is described in detail. These bundles are orbit spaces of free U(1)- actions on \(S^{2p+1}\times S^{2q+1}\). All of them are homogeneous, most are not homeomorphic for different U(1)-actions, and some are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic (which was shown by Kreck and Stolz). Other families of example are inhomogeneous (in fact, they can have arbitrary high cohomogeneity) if one uses for \(M_ 1\) inhomogeneous Kähler-Einstein manifolds which have been constructed by Tian and Yau. The first author recently obtained analogous results when the Kähler manifolds \(M_ 1\) are replaced with quaternionic Kähler manifolds [\textit{M. Y. Wang}, Einstein metrics and quaternionic Kähler manifolds (Preprint)].