YAMABE TYPE EQUATIONS ON THREE DIMENSIONAL RIEMANNIAN MANIFOLDS

Abstract

A theorem of Escobar and Schoen asserts that on a positive three dimensional smooth compact Riemannian manifold which is not conformally equivalent to the standard three dimensional sphere, a necessary and sufficient condition for a C2 function K to be the scalar curvature function of some conformal metric is that K is positive somewhere. We show that for any positive C2 function K, all such metrics stay in a compact set with respect to C3 norms and the total Leray-Schauder degree of all solutions is equal to -1. Such existence and compactness results no longer hold in such generality in higher dimensions or on manifolds conformally equivalent to standard three dimensional spheres. The results are also established for more general Yamabe type equations on three dimensional manifolds.