The Yau-Tian-Donaldson conjecture for cohomogeneity one manifolds

TL;DR

This paper proves the Yau-Tian-Donaldson conjecture for cohomogeneity one manifolds, establishing a link between G-uniform K-stability and K-stability for certain spherical varieties, with practical combinatorial criteria.

Contribution

It extends the Yau-Tian-Donaldson conjecture to cohomogeneity one manifolds and characterizes G-uniform K-stability via combinatorial conditions for rank one polarized spherical varieties.

Findings

G-uniform K-stability is equivalent to K-stability for specific G-equivariant test configurations.

A practical combinatorial condition encodes the stability equivalence.

Examples illustrate the theoretical results and answer open questions.

Abstract

We prove the Yau-Tian-Donaldson conjecture for cohomogeneity one manifolds, that is, for projective manifolds equipped with a holomorphic action of a compact Lie group with at least one real hypersurface orbit. Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief, such manifolds do not admit extremal K\"ahler metrics in all K\"ahler classes in general. More generally, we prove that for rank one polarized spherical varieties, G-uniform K-stability is equivalent to K-stability with respect to special G-equivariant test configurations. This is furthermore encoded by a single combinatorial condition, checkable in practice. We illustrate on examples and answer along the way a question of Kanemitsu.