Abstract.
The Yamabe invariant of a smooth compact manifold is by definition the supremum of the scalar curvatures of unit-volume Yamabe metrics on the manifold. For an explicit infinite class of 4-manifolds, we show that this invariant is positive but strictly less than that of the 4-sphere. This is done by using \( spin^c \) Dirac operators to control the lowest eigenvalue of a perturbation of the Yamabe Laplacian. These results dovetail perfectly with those derived from the perturbed Seiberg–Witten equations [Le3], but the present method is much more elementary in spirit.
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Submitted: October 1997
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Gursky, M., LeBrun, C. Yamabe Invariants and $ Spin^c $ Structures. GAFA, Geom. funct. anal. 8, 965–977 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/s000390050120
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s000390050120