Riemannian geometry of \(\text{Diff}(S^{1})/S^{1}\) (Q860768)

Let \(\text{Diff}(S^1)\) be the Virasoro group of orientation-preserving diffeomorphisms of the unit circle. The geometry of the quotient space \(\text{Diff}(S^1)/S^1\) has been of interest to physics in connection with string theory. It is well-known, that the homogeneous space \(\text{Diff}(S^1)/S^1\) is an infinite-dimensional complex manifold with a Kähler metric. Let \(\text{diff}_0(S^1)=\text{diff}(S^1)/S^1\) be the Virasoro algebra with natural trigonometric basis \(\{f_k=\cos kt,\;g_k=\sin kt,\;k=1,2,\dots \}\). This algebra has the natural almost complex structure \(J\), \(J g_k=f_k\) which has a zero torsion. This allows us to treat this structure as complex. Suppose \(c\), \(h\) are positive constants. For any \(k\in \mathbb Z\), let \(\theta_k =2hk+c(k^3-k)/12\). The inner product \(B(f,g)\) on \(\text{diff}_0(S^1)\) is defined by the formula \(B(f,f)=\frac12\sum_{k=1}^{\infty}\theta_k\left (a_k(f)^2 + b_k(f)^2 \right)\). The aim of present article is to compute the Riemannian curvature tensor and the Ricci tensor for the space \(\text{Diff}(S^1)/S^1\) without appealing directly to the Kähler structure symmetries. The authors used the classical finite-dimensional results for homogeneous spaces. First the authors computed the original covariant derivative \(\nabla_x y\) in the natural trigonometric basis of the Virasoro algebra. This is a technical result with respect to the main goal of this paper, and it is easy to check that the Ricci curvature for this covariant derivative is not bounded. Then the authors compute the Riemannian curvature tensor and the Ricci curvature corresponding to the covariant derivative \(\widetilde{\nabla}_x y = \nabla_x y - Q(x,y)\) compatible with the complex structure \(J\), where \(4Q(x,y)=(\nabla_{Jy} J)x + J((\nabla_{y} J)x) + 2J((\nabla_{x} J)y)\). The main results of this paper is the theorem, which shows that the Ricci curvature for \(\widetilde{\nabla}\) is finite.