Topology of locally conformally Kahler manifolds with potential

Abstract

Locally conformally Kahler (LCK) manifolds with potential are those which admit a Kahler covering with a proper, automorphic Kaehler potential. Existence of a potential can be characterized cohomologically as a vanishing of a certain cohomology class, called the Bott-Chern class. Compact LCK manifolds with potential are stable at small deformations and admit holomorphic embeddings into Hopf manifolds. This class strictly includes the Vaisman manifolds. We show that every compact LCK manifold with potential can be deformed into a Vaisman manifold. Therefore, every such manifold is diffeomorphic to a smooth elliptic fibration over a Kahler orbifold. We show that the pluricanonical condition on LCK manifolds introduced by G. Kokarev is equivalent to vanishing of the Bott-Chern class. This gives a simple proof of some of the results on topology of pluricanonical LCK-manifolds, discovered by Kokarev and Kotschick.