A Variational Characterization of Contact Metric Manifolds With Vanishing Torsion

Abstract

AbstractChern and Hamilton considered the integral of the Webster scalar curvature as a functional on the set of CR-structures on a compact 3-dimensional contact manifold. Critical points of this functional can be viewed as Riemannian metrics associated to the contact structure for which the characteristic vector field generates a 1-parameter group of isometries i.e. K-contact metrics. Tanno defined a higher dimensional generalization of the Webster scalar curvature, computed the critical point condition of the corresponding integral functional and found that it is not the K-contact condition. In this paper two other generalizations are given and the critical point conditions of the corresponding integral functionals are found. For the second of these, this is the K-contact condition, suggesting that it may be the proper generalization of the Webster scalar curvature.