ON THE GLOBAL STRUCTURE OF CONFORMAL GRADIENT SOLITONS WITH NONNEGATIVE RICCI TENSOR

Abstract

In this paper we prove that any complete conformal gradient soliton with nonnegative Ricci tensor is either isometric to a direct product ℝ × N n-1 , or globally conformally equivalent to the Euclidean space ℝ n or to the round sphere 𝕊 n . In particular, we show that any complete, noncompact, gradient Yamabe-type soliton with positive Ricci tensor is rotationally symmetric, whenever the potential function is nonconstant.