Tangent sphere bundles with constant trace of the Jacobi operator (Q695021)

The paper under review deals with the geometry of the unit tangent sphere bundle \(T_{1}M\) of a Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) equipped with the canonical metrical structure \((\eta, \xi, \phi, \bar{g})\). The authors study the geometrical properties of the base manifold \(M\) under the assumption that the trace of the Jacobi operator with respect to the characteristic vector field \(\xi\) is constant. The authors give some examples of Einstein Riemannian manifolds, other than rank-one symmetric spaces or globally Ossermann manifolds, for which the Jacobi operators on the unit tangent sphere bundles which have constant trace. These results are then extended to the tangent sphere bundle \(T_{r}M\) of constant radius \(r>0\). The main results of the paper, namely Theorem 4.1 and Theorem 4.2, are given below. Theorem 4.1. Let \((M,g)\) be an \(n\)-dimensional (\(n \geq 4\)) conformally flat manifold. Then, \([T_{1}M, (\eta, \xi, \phi, \bar{g})]\) has the property that the trace of the Jacobi operator is constant, if and only if \((M,g)\) has constant sectional curvature. Theorem 4.2. On the unit tangent sphere bundle \([T_{1}M, (\eta, \xi, \phi, \bar{g})]\) of a product manifold \((M,g) = (M_{1}^{p},g_{1}) \times (M_{2}^{p},g_{2})\), the Jacobi operator has constant trace, if and only if \((M_{1},g_{1})\) and \((M_{2},g_{2})\) are flat.