Extremal K-contact metrics

Abstract

Extending a result of He to the non-integrable case of K-contact manifolds, it is shown that transverse Hermitian scalar curvature may be interpreted as a moment map for the strict contactomorphism group. As a consequence, we may generalize the Sasaki-Futaki invariant to K-contact geometry and establish a number of elementary properties. Moreover, we prove that in dimension 5 certain deformation-theoretic results can be established also under weaker integrability conditions by exploiting the relationship between J-anti-invariant and self-dual 2-forms.