Balanced Hermitian structures on almost abelian Lie algebras

Abstract

We study balanced Hermitian structures on almost abelian Lie algebras, i.e. on Lie algebras with a codimension-one abelian ideal. In particular, we classify six-dimensional almost abelian Lie algebras which carry a balanced structure. It has been conjectured in [1] that a compact complex manifold admitting both a balanced metric and an SKT metric necessarily has a Kähler metric: we prove this conjecture for compact almost abelian solvmanifolds with left-invariant complex structures. Moreover, we investigate the behaviour of the flow of balanced metrics introduced in [2] and of the anomaly flow [3] on almost abelian Lie groups. In particular, we show that the anomaly flow preserves the balanced condition and that locally conformally Kähler metrics are fixed points.