Prescribed diagonal Schouten tensor in locally conformally flat manifolds

Abstract

We consider the pseudo-euclidean space ${(\mathbb{R}^n, g)}$ , with n ≥  3 and ${g_{ij} = \delta_{ij} \varepsilon_i, \varepsilon_i = \pm 1}$ and tensors of the form ${T = \sum \nolimits_i \varepsilon_i f_i (x) dx_i^2}$ . In this paper, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for a diagonal tensor to admit a metric ${\bar{g}}$ , conformal to g, so that ${A_{\bar g}=T}$ , where ${A_{\bar g}}$ is the Schouten Tensor of the metric ${\bar g}$ . The solution to this problem is given explicitly for special cases for the tensor T, including a case where the metric ${\bar g}$ is complete on ${\mathbb{R}^n}$ . Similar problems are considered for locally conformally flat manifolds. As an application of these results we consider the problem of finding metrics ${\bar g}$ , conformal to g, such that ${\sigma_2 ({\bar g })}$ or ${\frac{\sigma_2 ({\bar g })}{\sigma_1 ({\bar g })}}$ is equal to a given function. We prove that for some functions, f ₁ and f ₂, there exist complete metrics ${\bar{g} = g/{\varphi^2}}$ , such that ${\sigma_2 ({\bar g }) = f_1}$ or ${\frac{\sigma_2 ({\bar g })}{\sigma_1 ({\bar g })} = f_2}$ .