On a fully nonlinear elliptic equation with differential forms

Abstract

We introduce a fully nonlinear PDE with a differential form $\Lambda$, which unifies several important equations in K\"ahler geometry including Monge-Amp\`ere equations, J-equations, inverse $\sigma_{k}$ equations, and the deformed Hermitian Yang-Mills (dHYM) equation. We pose some natural positivity conditions on $\Lambda$, and prove analytical and algebraic criterions for the solvability of the equation. Our results generalize previous works of G.Chen, J.Song, Datar-Pingali and others. As an application, we prove a conjecture of Collins-Jacob-Yau for the dHYM equation with small global phase.