Stability of Riemannian manifolds with Killing spinors

Abstract

Riemannian manifolds with nonzero Killing spinors are Einstein manifolds. Kröncke proved that all complete Riemannian manifolds with imaginary Killing spinors are (linearly) strictly stable in [Stable and unstable Einstein warped products, preprint (2015), arXiv:1507.01782v1 ]. In this paper, we obtain a new proof for this stability result by using a Bochner-type formula in [X. Dai, X. Wang and G. Wei, On the stability of Riemannian manifold with parallel spinors, Invent. Math. 161(1) (2005) 151–176; M. Wang, Preserving parallel spinors under metric deformations, Indiana Univ. Math. J. 40 (1991) 815–844]. Moreover, existence of real Killing spinors is closely related to the Sasaki–Einstein structure. A regular Sasaki–Einstein manifold is essentially the total space of a certain principal [Formula: see text]-bundle over a Kähler–Einstein manifold. We prove that if the base space is a product of two Kähler–Einstein manifolds then the regular Sasaki–Einstein manifold is unstable. This provides us many new examples of unstable manifolds with real Killing spinors.