The twistor equation of Riemannian manifolds (Q808445)

This article is devoted to the so-called twistor spinors, a special kind of spinors on Riemannian manifolds. It is shown that a twistor spinor on a Riemannian manifold defines a conformal deformation to an Einstein manifold. We study twistor spinors on 4-manifolds and give informations concerning the dimension of the kernel of the twistor operator on connected and simply connected Riemannian 4-manifolds. A characterization of the hyperbolic space is given, it is shown that a complete \(n\)-dimensional Einstein manifold with negative scalar curvature \(R=Kn(n-1)\) and a non-parallel twistor spinor whose length function attains a minimum is the hyperbolic space \(H^ n(K)\). Moreover the solutions of the twistor equation on warped products \(M^ n\times R\), where \(M^ n\) is an Einstein manifold, are described. Furthermore, we give examples of warped products admitting twistor spinors with an arbitrary number of zeros.