On nearly Sasakian and nearly cosymplectic manifolds (Q681682)

We recall that a Sasakian manifold is defined as a contact metric manifold \((M,\phi,\xi,\eta,g)\) such that the tensor field \(N_{\phi}:=[\phi,\phi]+d\eta\otimes\xi\) vanishes identically. It is well known that an almost contact metric manifold is Sasakian if and only if the Levi-Civita connection satisfies \((\nabla_{X}\phi)Y=g(X,Y)\xi-\eta(Y)X\). A smooth manifold \(M\) endowed with an almost contact metric structure \((\phi,\xi,\eta,g)\) is said to be nearly Sasakian if \((\nabla_X\phi)X=g(X,X)\xi-\eta(X)X\), for every vector field \(X\) on \(M\). Similarly, the condition for \(M\) to be nearly cosymplectic is given by \((\nabla_X\phi)X=0\), for every vector field \(X\) on \(M\). In this paper it is proved that every nearly Sasakian manifold of dimension greater than 5 is Sasakian. This provides a new criterion for an almost contact metric manifold to be Sasakian. The authors also prove that a nearly cosymplectic non-coKähler manifold \(M\) of dimension \(2n+1>5\) is locally isometric to one of the following Riemannian products: \(\mathbb{R}\times N^{2n}\) or \(M^5\times N^{2n-4}\), where \(N^{2n}\) is a nearly Kähler non-Kähler manifold, \(N^{2n-4}\) is a nearly Kähler manifold, and \(M^5\) is a nearly cosymplectic non-coKähler manifold.