Topological bounds on hyperk\"ahler manifolds

Abstract

We conjecture that certain curvature invariants of compact hyperk\"ahler manifolds are positive/negative. We prove the conjecture in complex dimension four, give an "experimental proof" in higher dimensions, and verify it for all known hyperk\"ahler manifolds up to dimension eight. As an application, we show that our conjecture leads to a bound on the second Betti number in all dimensions.