On the volume functional of compact manifolds with boundary with harmonic Weyl tensor

Abstract

One of the main aims of this article is to give the complete classification of critical metrics of the volume functional on a compact manifold $M$ with boundary $\partial M$ and with harmonic Weyl tensor, which improves the corresponding classification for complete locally conformally flat case, due to Miao and Tam [18]. In particular, we prove that a critical metric with harmonic Weyl tensor on a simply connected compact manifold with boundary isometric to a standard sphere ${\mathbb{S}}^{n-1}$ must be isometric to a geodesic ball in a simply connected space form ${\mathbb{R}}^n,$ ${\mathbb{H}}^n$ and ${\mathbb{S}}^n.$ In order to achieve our goal, firstly we shall conclude the classification of such critical metrics under the Bach-flat assumption and then we will prove that both geometric conditions are indeed equivalent.

20 pages