PONTRJAGIN FORMS AND INVARIANT OBJECTS RELATED TO THE Q-CURVATURE

Abstract

It was shown by Chern and Simons that the Pontrjagin forms are conformally invariant. We show them to be the Pontrjagin forms of the conformally invariant tractor connection. The Q-curvature is intimately related to the Pfaffian. Working on even-dimensional manifolds, we show how the k-form operators Qk of [12], which generalize the Q-curvature, retain a key aspect of the Q-curvature's relation to the Pfaffian, by obstructing certain representations of natural operators on closed forms. In a closely related direction, we show that the Qk give rise to conformally invariant quadratic forms Θk on cohomology that interpolate, in a suitable sense, between the integrated metric pairing (at k = n/2) and the Pfaffian (at k = 0). Using a different construction, we show that the Qk operators yield a map from conformal structures to Lagrangian subspaces of the direct sum Hk ⊕ Hk (where Hk is the dual of the de Rham cohomology space Hk); in an appropriate sense this generalizes the period map. We couple the Qk operators with the Pontrjagin forms to construct new natural densities that have many properties in common with the original Q-curvature; in particular these integrate to global conformal invariants. We also work out a relevant example, and show that the proof of the invariance of the (nonlinear) action functional whose critical metrics have constant Q-curvature extends to the action functionals for these new Q-like objects. Finally we set up eigenvalue problems that generalize to Qk-operators the Q-curvature prescription problem.