The ambient obstruction tensor and the conformal deformation complex

DOI10.2140/PJM.2006.226.309zbMATH Open1125.53010arXivmath/0408229OpenAlexW2153905972MaRDI QIDQ997112FDOQ997112

Authors: Rod Gover, Lawrence J. Peterson 

Publication date: 20 July 2007

Published in: Pacific Journal of Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The (Fefferman-Graham) ambient obstruction tensor is a conformally invariant symmetric trace-free 2-tensor on even-dimensional Riemannian and pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. The conformal deformation complex is a differential complex related to infinitesimal deformations of conformal structure. We construct a conformally invariant differential operator on algebraic Weyl tensors that gives special curved analogues of certain operators related to the deformation complex and that, upon application to the Weyl curvature, yields the obstruction tensor. This new definition of the obstruction tensor leads to simple direct proofs that the obstruction tensor is divergence free and vanishes for a class of metrics which (strictly) includes the class of conformally Einstein metrics. Our main constructions are based on the ambient metric of Fefferman-Graham and its relation to the conformal tractor connection. We prove that the obstruction tensor is an obstruction to the formal problem of obtaining a Ricci-flat ambient metric and that it may equivalently be viewed as the obstruction to finding an ambient metric with curvature harmonic for a certain (ambient) form Laplacian. This leads to a new ambient formula for the obstruction in terms of a power of this form Laplacian acting on the ambient curvature. This result leads us to construct Laplacian type operators that generalise the conformal Laplacians of Graham-Jenne-Mason-Sparling. As background to these issues, we give an explicit construction of the deformation complex in dimensions n>3, construct two related (detour) complexes, and establish essential properties of the operators in these.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0408229

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zbMATH Keywords

conformal geometryambient metricconformal deformationsdetour complexesdifferential complexes.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of Lie groups to the sciences; explicit representations (22E70) Differential invariants (local theory), geometric objects (53A55) Differential complexes (58J10)

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