Strict positivity of Kähler–Einstein currents

Abstract

Abstract Kähler–Einstein currents, also known as singular Kähler–Einstein metrics, have been introduced and constructed a little over a decade ago. These currents live on mildly singular compact Kähler spaces X and their two defining properties are the following: They are genuine Kähler–Einstein metrics on $X_{\mathrm {reg}}$ , and they admit local bounded potentials near the singularities of X. In this note, we show that these currents dominate a Kähler form near the singular locus, when either X admits a global smoothing, or when X has isolated smoothable singularities. Our results apply to klt pairs and allow us to show that if X is any compact Kähler space of dimension three with log terminal singularities, then any singular Kähler–Einstein metric of nonpositive curvature dominates a Kähler form.