On compact manifolds admitting indefinite metrics with parallel Weyl tensor (Q950264)

A pseudo-Riemannian not locally symmetric manifold \(M\) is called essentially conformally symmetric if it has a parallel Weyl tensor. The authors study differential geometry and topology of such manifolds. In particular, they prove that the manifold \(M\) has vanishing Pontryagin classes. Moreover, if it is compact, then it has zero Euler characteristic and infinite fundamental group. A classification of Lorentzian essentially conformally symmetric manifolds \(M\) is given. In the compact case, it is proven that some two-fold covering \(\tilde M\) of the manifold \(M\) admits a fibration over the circle with a fibre which has a flat torsionfree connection with a nonzero parallel vector field. The authors prove also that there is no compact 4-dimensional Lorentzian essentially conformally symmetric manifolds and starting from dimension 5, there are infinitely many such manifolds.