Nonnegative curvature and conullity of the curvature tensor

Abstract

The conullity of a curvature tensor is the codimension of its kernel. We consider the cases of conullity two in any dimension and conullity three in dimension four. We show that these conditions are compatible with non-negative sectional curvature only if either the manifold is diffeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^n$ or the universal cover is an isometric product with a Euclidean factor. Moreover, we show that finite volume manifolds with conullity 3 are locally products.