Examples of compact Einstein four-manifolds with negative curvature

TL;DR

This paper constructs new examples of compact, negatively curved Einstein 4-manifolds that are not locally homogeneous, using branched covers of hyperbolic 4-manifolds and perturbation techniques to achieve Einstein metrics.

Contribution

It provides the first known examples of non-locally homogeneous compact Einstein 4-manifolds with negative curvature, expanding the landscape of such geometries.

Findings

Successfully constructed non-homogeneous negatively curved Einstein 4-manifolds.

Developed a method to interpolate and perturb approximate Einstein metrics.

Proved existence of Einstein metrics on branched covers of hyperbolic 4-manifolds.

Abstract

We give new examples of compact, negatively curved Einstein manifolds of dimension $4$. These are seemingly the first such examples which are not locally homogeneous. Our metrics are carried by a sequence of 4-manifolds $(X_k)$ previously considered by Gromov and Thurston. The construction begins with a certain sequence $(M_k)$ of hyperbolic 4-manifolds, each containing a totally geodesic surface $\Sigma_k$ which is nullhomologous and whose normal injectivity radius tends to infinity with $k$. For a fixed choice of natural number $l$, we consider the $l$-fold cover $X_k \to M_k$ branched along $\Sigma_k$. We prove that for any choice of $l$ and all large enough $k$ (depending on $l$), $X_k$ carries an Einstein metric of negative sectional curvature. The first step in the proof is to find an approximate Einstein metric on $X_k$, which is done by interpolating between a model Einstein metric near the branch locus and the pull-back of the hyperbolic metric from $M_k$. The second step in the proof is to perturb this to a genuine solution to Einstein's equations, by a parameter dependent version of the inverse function theorem. The analysis relies on a delicate bootstrap procedure based on $L^2$ coercivity estimates.