Marked Poincaré rigidity near hyperbolic metrics and injectivity of the Lichnerowicz Laplacian in dimension 3

Abstract

Let $M$ be a compact manifold without boundary equipped with a Riemannian metric $g$ of negative curvature. In this paper, we introduce the marked Poincaré determinant (MPD), a homothety invariant of $g$ depending on differentiable periodic data of its geodesic flow. The MPD associates to each free homotopy class of closed curves in $M$ a number which measures the unstable volume expansion of the geodesic flow along the associated closed geodesic. We prove a local MPD rigidity result in dimension 3: if $g$ is sufficiently close to a hyperbolic metric $g_0$ and both metrics have the same MPD, then they are homothetic. As a by-product of our proof, we show the Lichnerowicz Laplacian of $g_0$ is injective on the space of trace-free divergence-free symmetric 2-tensors, which, to our knowledge, is the first result of its kind in negative curvature.

20 pages, comments welcome. v2: corrected sign error in Remarks 1.7 and 5.8