Besse conjecture with vanishing conditions on the Weyl tensor

Abstract

On a compact $n$-dimensional manifold, it is well known that a critical metric of the total scalar curvature, restricted to the space of metrics with unit volume is Einstein. It has been conjectured that a critical metric of the total scalar curvature, restricted to the space of metrics with constant scalar curvature of unit volume, will be Einstein. This conjecture was proposed in 1987 by Besse, but has yet to be proved. In this paper, we prove the Besse conjecture with a weaker condition than harmonic curvature for $n\geq 3$.