Einstein and Yang-Mills implies conformal Yang-Mills

Abstract

There exist conformally invariant, higher-derivative, variational analogs of the Yang-Mills condition for connections on vector bundles over a conformal manifold of even dimension greater than or equal to six. We give a compact formula for these analogs and prove that they are a strict weakening of the Yang-Mills condition with respect to an Einstein metric. We also show that the conformal Yang-Mills condition for the tractor connection of an even dimensional conformal manifold is equivalent to vanishing of its Fefferman-Graham obstruction tensor. This result uses that the tractor connection on a Poincar\'e-Einstein manifold is itself Yang-Mills.