On Brown-York mass and compactly conformal deformations of scalar curvature

Wei Yuan

Published 2015-05-16Version 1

In this article, we found a connection between Brown-York mass and the first Dirichlet Eigenvalue of a Schr\"odingier type operator. In particular, we proved a local positive mass type theorem for metrics conformal to the background one with suitable presumptions. As applications, we investigated compactly conformal deformations which either increase or decrease scalar curvature. We found local conformal rigidity phenomena occur in both cases for small domains and as for manifolds with nonpositive scalar curvature it is even more rigid in particular. On the other hand, such deformations exist for closed manifolds with positive scalar curvature. We also constructed such kind of deformations on a type of product manifolds that either increase or decrease their scalar curvature compactly and conformally. These results together answered a natural question arises in \cite{Corvino, Lohkamp}.