Weighted K-stability of polarized varieties and extremality of Sasaki manifolds

Abstract

We use the correspondence between extremal Sasaki structures and weighted extremal Kähler metrics defined on a regular quotient of a Sasaki manifold, established by the first two authors in [1], and the theory of weighted K-stability (introduced by Lahdili in [39]) in order to define a suitable notion of (relative) weighted K-stability for compact Sasaki manifolds of regular type. We show that the (relative) weighted K-stability with respect to a maximal torus and smooth equivariant test configurations with reduced central fibre is a necessary condition for the existence of a (possibly irregular) extremal Sasaki metric. We also compare weighted K-stability to the K-stability of the corresponding polarized affine cone (introduced by Collins–Székelyhidi in [18]), and prove that they agree on the class of test configurations we consider. As a byproduct, we strengthen the obstruction to the existence of a scalar-flat Kähler cone metric found in [18] from the K-semistability to the K-stability on these test configurations. We use our approach to give a characterization of the existence of a compatible extremal Sasaki structure on a principal S1-bundle over an admissible ruled manifold in the sense of [4], expressed in terms of the positivity of a single polynomial of one variable over a given interval.