The Ricci tensor can be characterized by measurement of how a shape is deformed as one moves along
geodesics in the space. In
general relativity, which involves the pseudo-Riemannian setting, this is reflected by the presence of the Ricci tensor in the
Raychaudhuri equation. Partly for this reason, the
Einstein field equations propose that spacetime can be described by a pseudo-Riemannian metric, with a strikingly simple relationship between the Ricci tensor and the matter content of the universe.
Like the metric tensor, the Ricci tensor assigns to each
tangent space of the manifold a
symmetric bilinear form (
Besse 1987, p. 43).[1] Broadly, one could analogize the role of the Ricci curvature in Riemannian geometry to that of the
Laplacian in the analysis of functions; in this analogy, the
Riemann curvature tensor, of which the Ricci curvature is a natural by-product, would correspond to the full matrix of second derivatives of a function. However, there are
other ways to draw the same analogy.
In differential geometry, lower bounds on the Ricci tensor on a Riemannian manifold allow one to extract global geometric and topological information by comparison (cf.
comparison theorem) with the geometry of a constant curvature
space form. This is since lower bounds on the Ricci tensor can be successfully used in studying the length functional in Riemannian geometry, as first shown in 1941 via
Myers's theorem.
One common source of the Ricci tensor is that it arises whenever one commutes the covariant derivative with the tensor Laplacian. This, for instance, explains its presence in the
Bochner formula, which is used ubiquitously in Riemannian geometry. For example, this formula explains why the gradient estimates due to
Shing-Tung Yau (and their developments such as the Cheng-Yau and Li-Yau inequalities) nearly always depend on a lower bound for the Ricci curvature.
In 2007,
John Lott,
Karl-Theodor Sturm, and
Cedric Villani demonstrated decisively that lower bounds on Ricci curvature can be understood entirely in terms of the metric space structure of a Riemannian manifold, together with its volume form.[2] This established a deep link between Ricci curvature and
Wasserstein geometry and
optimal transport, which is presently the subject of much research.[citation needed]
Sign conventions. Note that some sources define to be
what would here be called they would then define
as
Although sign conventions differ about the Riemann tensor, they do not differ about
the Ricci tensor.
Definition via local coordinates on a smooth manifold
Let be a smooth
Riemannian
or
pseudo-Riemannian-manifold.
Given a smooth chart one then has functions
and
for each
which satisfy
for all . The latter shows that, expressed as
matrices, .
The functions are defined by evaluating on
coordinate vector fields, while the functions are defined so
that, as a matrix-valued function, they provide an inverse to the matrix-valued
function .
Now define, for each , , , ,
and between 1 and , the functions
as maps .
Now let and be two smooth charts with .
Let be the functions computed as above via the chart and let be the functions computed as above via the chart .
Then one can check by a calculation with the chain rule and the product rule that
where is the first derivative along th direction
of .
This shows that the following definition does not depend on the choice of
.
For any , define a bilinear map
by
where and are the
components of the tangent vectors at in and relative to
the coordinate vector fields of .
It is common to abbreviate the above formal presentation in the following style:
Let be a smooth manifold, and let g be a Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian metric. In local smooth coordinates, define the Christoffel symbols
It can be directly checked that
so that define a (0,2)-tensor field on . In
particular, if and are vector fields on ,
then relative to any smooth coordinates one has
The final line includes the demonstration that the bilinear map Ric is well-defined,
which is much easier to write out with the informal notation.
Comparison of the definitions
The two above definitions are identical. The formulas defining and in the coordinate approach have an exact parallel in the formulas defining the Levi-Civita connection, and the Riemann curvature via the Levi-Civita connection. Arguably, the definitions directly using local coordinates are preferable, since the "crucial property" of the Riemann tensor mentioned above requires to be Hausdorff in order to hold. By contrast, the local coordinate approach only requires a smooth atlas. It is also somewhat easier to connect the "invariance" philosophy underlying the local approach with the methods of constructing more exotic geometric objects, such as
spinor fields.
The complicated formula defining in the introductory section is the same as that in the following section. The only difference is that terms have been grouped so that it is easy to see that
Properties
As can be seen from the symmetries of the Riemann curvature tensor, the Ricci tensor of a Riemannian
manifold is
symmetric, in the sense that
for all
It thus follows linear-algebraically that the Ricci tensor is completely determined
by knowing the quantity for all vectors
of unit length. This function on the set of unit tangent vectors
is often also called the Ricci curvature, since knowing it is equivalent to
knowing the Ricci curvature tensor.
The Ricci curvature is determined by the
sectional curvatures of a Riemannian
manifold, but generally contains less information. Indeed, if is a
vector of unit length on a Riemannian -manifold, then
is precisely
times the average value of the sectional curvature, taken over all the 2-planes
containing . There is an -dimensional family
of such 2-planes, and so only in dimensions 2 and 3 does the Ricci tensor determine
the full curvature tensor. A notable exception is when the manifold is given a
priori as a
hypersurface of
Euclidean space. The
second fundamental form,
which determines the full curvature via the
Gauss–Codazzi equation,
is itself determined by the Ricci tensor and the
principal directions
of the hypersurface are also the
eigendirections of the Ricci tensor. The
tensor was introduced by Ricci for this reason.
As can be seen from the second Bianchi identity, one has
where is the
scalar curvature, defined in local coordinates as This is often called the contracted second Bianchi identity.
Direct geometric meaning
Near any point in a Riemannian manifold ,
one can define preferred local coordinates, called
geodesic normal coordinates.
These are adapted to the metric so that geodesics through correspond
to straight lines through the origin, in such a manner that the geodesic distance
from corresponds to the Euclidean distance from the origin.
In these coordinates, the metric tensor is well-approximated by the Euclidean
metric, in the precise sense that
In fact, by taking the
Taylor expansion of the metric applied to a
Jacobi field along a radial geodesic in the normal coordinate system, one has
In these coordinates, the metric
volume element then has the following expansion at p:
which follows by expanding the square root of the
determinant of the metric.
Thus, if the Ricci curvature is positive
in the direction of a vector , the conical region in
swept out by a tightly focused family of geodesic segments of length
emanating from , with initial velocity inside
a small cone about , will have smaller volume than the corresponding
conical region in Euclidean space, at least provided that
is sufficiently small. Similarly, if the Ricci curvature is negative in the
direction of a given vector , such a conical region in the manifold
will instead have larger volume than it would in Euclidean space.
The Ricci curvature is essentially an average of curvatures in the planes including
. Thus if a cone emitted with an initially circular (or spherical)
cross-section becomes distorted into an ellipse (
ellipsoid), it is possible
for the volume distortion to vanish if the distortions along the
principal axes counteract one another. The Ricci
curvature would then vanish along . In physical applications, the
presence of a nonvanishing
sectional curvature does not necessarily indicate the
presence of any mass locally; if an initially circular cross-section of a cone
of
worldlines later becomes elliptical, without changing its volume, then
this is due to tidal effects from a mass at some other location.
Ricci curvature also appears in the
Ricci flow equation, first
introduced by
Richard S. Hamilton in 1982, where certain
one-parameter families of Riemannian metrics are singled out as solutions of a
geometrically-defined partial differential equation.
In
harmonic local coordinates the Ricci tensor can be expressed as (
Chow & Knopf 2004, Lemma 3.32).[3]
where are the components of the metric tensor and is the
Laplace–Beltrami operator.
This fact motivates the introduction of the
Ricci flow equation
as a natural extension of the
heat equation for the metric.
Since heat tends to spread through
a solid until the body reaches an equilibrium state of constant temperature, if
one is given a manifold, the Ricci flow may be hoped to produce an 'equilibrium'
Riemannian metric which is
Einstein or of constant curvature.
However, such a clean "convergence" picture cannot be achieved since many manifolds
cannot support such metrics. A detailed study of the nature of solutions of the
Ricci flow, due principally to Hamilton and
Grigori Perelman, shows that the
types of "singularities" that occur along a Ricci flow, corresponding to the
failure of convergence, encodes deep information about 3-dimensional topology.
The culmination of this work was a proof of the
geometrization conjecture
first proposed by
William Thurston in the 1970s, which can be thought of as
a classification of compact 3-manifolds.
On a
Kähler manifold, the Ricci curvature determines the first
Chern class
of the manifold (mod torsion). However, the Ricci curvature has no analogous
topological interpretation on a generic Riemannian manifold.
Global geometry and topology
Here is a short list of global results concerning manifolds with positive Ricci curvature; see also
classical theorems of Riemannian geometry. Briefly, positive Ricci curvature of a Riemannian manifold has strong topological consequences, while (for dimension at least 3), negative Ricci curvature has no topological implications. (The Ricci curvature is said to be positive if the Ricci curvature function is positive on the set of non-zero tangent vectors .) Some results are also known for pseudo-Riemannian manifolds.
Myers' theorem (1941) states that if the Ricci curvature is bounded from below on a complete Riemannian n-manifold by , then the manifold has diameter . By a covering-space argument, it follows that any compact manifold of positive Ricci curvature must have finite
fundamental group.
Cheng (1975) showed that, in this setting, equality in the diameter inequality occurs if only if the manifold is
isometric to a sphere of a constant curvature .
The
Bishop–Gromov inequality states that if a complete -dimensional Riemannian manifold has non-negative Ricci curvature, then the volume of a geodesic ball is less than or equal to the volume of a geodesic ball of the same radius in Euclidean -space. Moreover, if denotes the volume of the ball with center and radius in the manifold and denotes the volume of the ball of radius in Euclidean -space then the function is nonincreasing. This can be generalized to any lower bound on the Ricci curvature (not just nonnegativity), and is the key point in the proof of
Gromov's compactness theorem.)
The Cheeger–Gromoll
splitting theorem states that if a complete Riemannian manifold with contains a line, meaning a geodesic such that for all , then it is isometric to a product space . Consequently, a complete manifold of positive Ricci curvature can have at most one topological end. The theorem is also true under some additional hypotheses for complete
Lorentzian manifolds (of metric signature ) with non-negative Ricci tensor (
Galloway 2000).
Hamilton's first
convergence theorem for Ricci flow has, as a corollary, that the only compact 3-manifolds which have Riemannian metrics of positive Ricci curvature are the quotients of the 3-sphere by discrete subgroups of SO(4) which act properly discontinuously. He later extended this to allow for nonnegative Ricci curvature. In particular, the only simply-connected possibility is the 3-sphere itself.
These results, particularly Myers' and Hamilton's, show that positive Ricci curvature has strong topological consequences. By contrast, excluding the case of surfaces, negative Ricci curvature is now known to have no topological implications;
Lohkamp (1994) has shown that any manifold of dimension greater than two admits a complete Riemannian metric of negative Ricci curvature. In the case of two-dimensional manifolds, negativity of the Ricci curvature is synonymous with negativity of the Gaussian curvature, which has very clear
topological implications. There are very few two-dimensional manifolds which fail to admit Riemannian metrics of negative Gaussian curvature.
Behavior under conformal rescaling
If the metric is changed by multiplying it by a conformal factor
, the Ricci tensor of the new, conformally-related metric
is given (
Besse 1987, p. 59) by
where is the (positive spectrum) Hodge Laplacian, i.e.,
the opposite of the usual trace of the Hessian.
In particular, given a point in a Riemannian manifold, it is always
possible to find metrics conformal to the given metric for which the
Ricci tensor vanishes at . Note, however, that this is only pointwise
assertion; it is usually impossible to make the Ricci curvature vanish identically
on the entire manifold by a conformal rescaling.
For two dimensional manifolds, the above formula shows that if is a
harmonic function, then the conformal scaling
does not change the Ricci tensor (although it still changes its trace with respect
to the metric unless .
Trace-free Ricci tensor
In
Riemannian geometry and
pseudo-Riemannian geometry, the
trace-free Ricci tensor (also called traceless Ricci tensor) of a
Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian -manifold
is the tensor defined by
where and denote the Ricci curvature
and
scalar curvature of . The name of this object reflects the
fact that its
trace automatically vanishes:
However, it is quite an
important tensor since it reflects an "orthogonal decomposition" of the Ricci tensor.
The orthogonal decomposition of the Ricci tensor
The following, not so trivial, property is
It is less immediately obvious that the two terms on the right hand side are orthogonal
to each other:
An identity which is intimately connected with this (but which could be proved directly)
is that
The trace-free Ricci tensor and Einstein metrics
By taking a divergence, and using the contracted Bianchi identity, one sees that
implies .
So, provided that n ≥ 3 and is connected, the vanishing
of implies that the scalar curvature is constant. One can then see
that the following are equivalent:
for some number
In the Riemannian setting, the above orthogonal decomposition shows that
is also equivalent to these conditions.
In the pseudo-Riemmannian setting, by contrast, the condition
does not necessarily imply so the most that one can say is that
these conditions imply
In particular, the vanishing of trace-free Ricci tensor characterizes
Einstein manifolds, as defined by the condition
for a number In
general relativity, this equation states
that is a solution of Einstein's vacuum field
equations with
cosmological constant.
The Levi-Civita connection corresponding to the metric on gives
rise to a connection on . The curvature of this connection is
the 2-form defined by
where is the
complex structure map on the
tangent bundle determined by the structure of the Kähler manifold. The Ricci
form is a
closed 2-form. Its
cohomology class is,
up to a real constant factor, the first
Chern class of the canonical bundle,
and is therefore a topological invariant of (for compact )
in the sense that it depends only on the topology of and the
homotopy class of the complex structure.
Conversely, the Ricci form determines the Ricci tensor by
In local holomorphic coordinates , the Ricci form is given by
If the Ricci tensor vanishes, then the canonical bundle is flat, so the
structure group can be locally reduced to a subgroup of the
special linear group . However, Kähler manifolds
already possess
holonomy in , and so the (restricted)
holonomy of a Ricci-flat Kähler manifold is contained in .
Conversely, if the (restricted) holonomy of a 2-dimensional Riemannian
manifold is contained in , then the manifold is a Ricci-flat
Kähler manifold (
Kobayashi & Nomizu 1996, IX, §4).
Generalization to affine connections
The Ricci tensor can also be generalized to arbitrary
affine connections,
where it is an invariant that plays an especially important role in the study of
projective geometry (geometry associated to
unparameterized geodesics) (
Nomizu & Sasaki 1994). If
denotes an affine connection, then the curvature tensor is the
(1,3)-tensor defined by
for any vector fields . The Ricci tensor is defined to be the trace:
In this more general situation, the Ricci tensor is symmetric if and only if there
exists locally a parallel
volume form for the connection.
Discrete Ricci curvature
Notions of Ricci curvature on discrete manifolds have been defined on graphs and
networks, where they quantify local divergence properties of edges. Ollivier's
Ricci curvature is defined using optimal transport theory.[4]
A different (and earlier) notion, Forman's Ricci curvature, is based on
topological arguments.[5]