Critical Metrics of the Volume Functional on Manifolds with Boundary

Abstract

The goal of this article is to study the space of smooth Riemannian structures on compact manifolds with boundary that satisfies a critical point equation associated with a boundary value problem. We provide an integral formula which enables us to show that if a critical metric of the volume functional on a connected $n$-dimensional manifold $M^n$ with boundary $\partial M$ has parallel Ricci tensor, then $M^n$ is isometric to a geodesic ball in a simply connected space form ${\mathbb{R}}^n$, ${\mathbb{H}}^n$ or ${\mathbb{S}}^n$.