Energy functionals and canonical Kähler metrics (Q877486)

The authors study the properties of some functionals related to the existence of extremal metrics on some Kähler manifolds. Some other invariants related to the property of a Kähler manifold \(M\) to be stable are investigated: the first Chern class \(c_1(M)\), Futaki invariant, Mabuchi energy etc. The authors discuss a family of functionals \(E_k, \;k=0,\dots , n\), introduced in [\textit{X. X. Chen} and \textit{G. Tian}, Invent. Math. 147, 487--544 (2002; Zbl 1047.53043)], which are generalizations of the Mabuchi energy (in fact \(E_0\) is just the Mabuchi energy). Let \(\omega \) be a Kähler form on the compact manifold \(M\) of complex dimension \(n\). Consider the space \(P(M,\omega)\) of all smooth functions \(\phi\) such that \(\omega_\phi=\omega +\sqrt{-1}\partial \overline{\partial}\phi>0\). For \(\phi\in P(M,\omega)\), let \(\phi_t\) be a path in \(P(M,\omega)\) with \(\phi_0=0\) and \(\phi_1 =\phi\). The functional \(E_{k,\omega}\), for \(k=0,1,\dots, n\) is defined by \[ \begin{multlined} E_{k,\omega}(\phi) ={(k+1)\over {V}}\int_0^1\int_M(\Delta_{\phi_t}\dot\Phi_t)\text{ Ric}(\omega_{\phi_t})^k\wedge \omega^{n-k}_{\phi_t}\,dt - \\ -{(n-k)\over {V}}\int_0^1\int_M\dot\phi_t(\text{ Ric}(\omega_{\phi_t})^{k+1}- \mu_k\omega^{k+1}_{\phi_t})\wedge \omega^{n-k-1}_{\phi_t}\,dt,\end{multlined} \] where \(V\) is the volume of \(M\) with respect to \(\omega\) and \(\mu_k\) is a certain constant depending on the classes \([\omega]\) and \(c_1(M)\). A critical metric \(\omega\) of \(E_k\) is a solution of the equation \(\sigma_{k+1}(\omega) - \Delta(\sigma_k(\omega)) = \)constant, where \(\sigma_k\) is the \(k\)-th elementary symmetric polynomial in the eigenvalues of the Ricci tensor of the metric \(\omega\). The authors study some properties of the functionals \(E_k\), as well as of some other new functionals \(I\) and \(J\) (the lower boundedness) and insist in the study of the functional \(E_1\).