Bernhard Hanke (Augsburg)
Spaces of Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature on closed smooth manifolds have been studied intensively for many years. Typically, these spaces, if non-empty, are topologically highly non-trivial. However, the situation changes drastically under symmetry assumptions. In this talk, we demonstrate the contractibility of spaces of invariant metrics of positive scalar curvature on closed, connected manifolds with S1-actions containing fixed-point components of codimension two.
Key ingredients are the local flexibility properties of positive scalar curvature metrics and the smoothing of mean-convex singularities.
This is joint work with Christian Bär.
