Curvature in the balance: the Weyl functional and scalar curvature of \(4\)-manifolds (Q6188620)

On an oriented \(4\)-dimensional Riemannian manifold, curvature has natural decomposition into four components. The scalar curvature, the trace-free Ricci curvature and the two Weyl curvatures. If the manifold is compact and without boundary, we obtain the four quadratic curvature functionals on the space of Riemannian metrics. They are not independent, because of the Gauss-Bonnet formula and Thom-Hirzebruch formula, which relate these functionals with homotopy invariants. Hence one can consider the scalar curvature functional and the Weyl functional as the elementary functionals. A natural question is about comparing these functionals on various classes of manifolds. For example, for Kahler metrics, these functionals coincide. Einstein metrics also play a distinguished role in various results about this topic. In the present paper, these two functionals are studied and compared, with particular results on almost-Kahler manifolds.