Stability of Quadratic curvature Functionals at product Einstein manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, we study Riemannian functionals defined by $L^2$-norms of Ricci curvature, scalar curvature, Weyl curvature, and Riemannian curvature. We try to understand stability of their critical points that are products of Einstein metrics. In particular, we prove that the product of a spherical space form and a compact hyperbolic manifold is unstable for some quadratic functionals if the first eigenvalue of the Laplacian of the hyperbolic manifold is sufficiently small.