Collapsing geometry of hyperkähler 4-manifolds and applications (Q7028455)

A smooth Riemannian 4-manifold is hyper-Kähler if its holonomy group is contained in \(\mathrm{Sp}(1)=\mathrm{SU}(2) \subset \mathrm{SO}(4)\). The authors investigate degenerations of hyper-Kähler 4-manifolds, focusing on the case when the volume is collapsing. There are two important applications to their systematical study, settling two well-known conjectures. The main results are the following:\N\N(1) Any collapsed limit of unit-diameter hyper-Kähler metrics on the \(K3\) manifold is isometric to one of the following cases:\N\N\begin{itemize}\N\item the quotient of a flat 3-torus by an involution;\N\item a singular special Kähler metric on the 2-sphere;\N\item the unit interval.\N\end{itemize}\N\N(2) Any complete hyper-Kähler 4-manifold with finite energy (i.e., gravitational instanton) is asymptotic to a model end at infinity. \N\NThe methods used in this paper include: analyzing geometric structures over the regular region of the limit space coming from the hyper-Kähler structure, detailed study of the singularity structure of the limit space, and perturbation to invariant hyper-Kähler metrics.