Instability of some Riemannian manifolds with real Killing spinors (Q6172854)

Einstein metrics are critical points of the Einstein-Hilbert functional \({S}\), and in particular of Perelman's \(\nu\)-entropy functional. The authors study the linear stability under both \({S}\) and \(\nu\) of various compact homogeneous Einstein manifolds and give many instability results. Most of these admit a non-trivial Killing spinor and thus their metric cones have special holonomy. In particular, they show that every irreducible special holonomy type is realized by the cone over an unstable Einstein manifold. The first main result is the \({S}\)-linear instability of all invariant Einstein metrics on the Aloff-Wallach spaces \(N_{k,l}=\mathrm{SU}(3)/S^1_{k,l}\). The destabilizing directions are \(\mathrm{SU}(3)\)-invariant and constructed by analyzing the restriction of \({S}\) to invariant metrics. The second main result is \({S}\)- and \(\nu\)-linear instability of the regular Sasaki-Einstein manifolds that are circle bundles over some of the irreducible Hermitian symmetric spaces of compact type. The \({S}\)-instabilities from tt-tensors are again constructed as invariant tensors or lifted from the base, while the additional \(\nu\)-instabilities from conformal variations, which are certain Laplace-Beltrami eigenfunctions, are found using the fact that the Laplace-Beltrami operator on normal homogeneous spaces coincides with the Casimir operator. The \(S^1\)-fiber part is then scaled accordingly. The third part of the article deals case by case with the compact simply connected homogeneous Einstein manifolds of dimension \(5\leq n\leq 7\). An important tool is the canonical variation of Riemannian submersion metrics with totally geodesic fibers: if there are two Einstein metrics in the canonical variation, one of them is necessarily unstable. Except for symmetric spaces \(S^3\times S^3\), studied in [\textit{N. Koiso}, Osaka J. Math. 17, 51--73 (1980; Zbl 0426.53037)], where the homogeneous Einstein metrics are not fully classified, and the Berger space \(\mathrm{Sp}(2)/\mathrm{SU}(2)\) (later shown to be unstable in [\textit{U. Semmelmann} et al., Int. J. Math. 33, No. 6, Article ID 2250042, 17 p. (2022; Zbl 07537345)]), the metric is always \({S}\)-linearly unstable. Finally, the authors discuss the regular \(3\)-Sasakian case and prove that the two Einstein metrics in the canonical variation of the \(3\)-Sasakian \(\mathrm{SO}(3)\)-fibration over the complex \(2\)-plane Grassmannians are \({S}\)-unstable.