Cosymplectic Chern--Hamilton conjecture

Abstract

In this paper, we study the Chern-Hamilton energy functional on compact cosymplectic manifolds, fully classifying in dimension 3 those manifolds admitting a critical compatible metric for this functional. This is the case if and only if either the manifold is co-K\"ahler or if it is a mapping torus of the 2-torus by a hyperbolic toral automorphism and equipped with a suspension cosymplectic structure. Moreover, any critical metric has minimal energy among all compatible metrics. We also exhibit examples of manifolds with first Betti number $b_1 \geq 2$ admitting cosymplectic structures, but such that no cosymplectic structure admits a critical compatible metric.