1. Introduction
The study of manifolds is of high interest to geometers and physicists due to its wide applications in geometry, physics, and relativity. By studying the manifolds, the geometers have benefited from two fundamental tools—the Riemannian curvature tensor and the Ricci tensor–in understanding the differential geometric properties of the manifolds. Over the years, several new concepts have been introduced to the literature with the help of these tools in order to describe complex structures. One of these concepts is the 🟉-Ricci tensor
, which was first introduced by Tachibana on almost Hermitian manifolds [
1]. After Tachibana’s work, Hamada [
2] gave the definition of this concept for a contact metric manifold
E as follows,
for any vector fields
. Here,
R is the Riemannian curvature tensor,
is the 🟉-Ricci tensor of type
,
is a tensor field of type
and
denotes the set of all smooth vector fields of
E. Hamada also took into account the concept of 🟉-Einstein manifold and gave a classification of 🟉-Einstein hypersurfaces. The 🟉-Einstein manifold is a Riemannian manifold whose 🟉-Ricci tensor is a constant multiple of its metric tensor
g, that is,
, where
is a constant.
The 🟉-Ricci tensor, which has been very popular recently, carries important curvature properties, and these properties give helpful information regarding the geometry and structure of the manifold. Therefore, it has been the subject of interest of many mathematicians, and many studies have been done on this subject. For detailed information about this subject we recommend, in particular, references [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6].
On the other hand, Hamilton [
7] defined the notion of Ricci soliton as a natural generalization of Einstein manifolds in 1988. After Hamilton’s definition, several classes of Ricci solitons have been introduced in the literature. One important class is the notion of 🟉-Ricci soliton that was introduced by Kaimakamis et al. in 2014. They studied this notion in the context of real hypersurfaces of a complex space form [
8]. A Riemannian metric
g on a smooth manifold
E is called 🟉-Ricci soliton, if there exists a smooth vector field
J satisfying [
8]
for any vector fields
on
E. Here,
indicates the Lie-derivative operator along the vector field
J. If
, then the 🟉-Ricci soliton becomes a 🟉-Einstein manifold. Such a soliton is called steady, shrinking, or expanding according as
,
or
, respectively.
As a generalization of 🟉-Ricci soliton, Dey and Roy introduced the notion of 🟉-
-Ricci soliton as follows [
9]:
for any vector fields
on
E. We denote the 🟉-
-Ricci soliton by
. If
in (
1), then such a soliton reduces to a 🟉-Ricci soliton
. Recently, many geometers have made notable contributions to the Ricci,
-Ricci, 🟉-Ricci, 🟉-
-Ricci and 🟉-
-Ricci Yamabe solitons in the literature. Some of them are [
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24] and references therein.
The concept of soliton has been a current and popular topic for the last 20 years. In particular, this concept has become a more popular field of study for mathematicians after Perelman actively used Ricci solitons in his work to solve the Poincare conjecturé in 2002. The Ricci soliton and its generalizations have extensive applications, not only in mathematical physics but also in quantum cosmology, quantum gravity, and black holes as well. The Ricci soliton can be considered as a kinematic solution in fluid space-time, the profile of which develops a characterization of spaces of constant curvature along with the locally symmetric spaces. It also expresses geometrical and physical applications with relativistic viscous fluid space-time, admitting heat flux and stress, dark fluid, dust fluid, and radiation era in general relativistic space-time. A two-dimensional Ricci soliton can be used to discuss the behavior of mass under Ricci flow. The Ricci soliton is an important tool, as it can help in understanding the concepts of energy or entropy in general relativity. This property is the same as that of the heat equation due to which an isolated system loses the heat for thermal equilibrium. We, as a scholar in mathematics, study this subject theoretically, but this subject has many applications in physics. Therefore, it will be a field of study for physicists working on this topic.
During the last few years, one of the most active fields of study in differential geometry is the theory of contact manifolds. Contact metric manifolds are special Riemannian manifolds that have almost contact metric structure. Such manifolds have many applications in theoretical physics. They have several subclasses with various names and structures. One of these striking subclasses is the Kenmotsu manifold [
25]. These manifolds were defined by K. Kenmotsu. He showed that a locally Kenmotsu manifold is a warped product
of an interval
I and a Kaehler manifold
N with warping function
. Here,
is a constant. In recent years, Kenmotsu manifolds have been extensively studied by many geometers, such as ([
6,
13,
15,
23]).
In the present paper, we consider 🟉-Ricci solitons in the context of Kenmotsu manifolds satisfying certain curvature conditions. The present paper consists of five sections.
Section 1 is the introductory section. In
Section 2, some useful definitions and basic concepts of the contact metric manifolds are given. In
Section 3, we study certain flatness and
-semisymmetric conditions in Kenmotsu manifolds. In
Section 4, we study 🟉-
-Ricci solitons in Kenmotsu manifolds and obtain some significant results. Finally, an example of three-dimensional Kenmotsu manifolds has been constructed to verify some of our results.
2. Preliminaries
In this section, we give the preliminary concepts and definitions that are required for the study of Kenmotsu manifolds. Moreover, this section helps the readers for a better understanding of the subsequent sections in the paper.
A
-dimensional almost contact metric manifold
is a differentiable manifold that have an almost contact metric structure
satisfying [
26,
27]
and
for any vector fields
. Here,
is a tensor field of type
on
,
is a vector field,
is a 1-form associated with the unit vector field
, such that
and
g is the Riemannian metric tensor.
One can easily see that the following are deducible from the equalities (
2) and (
3):
An almost contact metric manifold
is called a Kenmotsu manifold if [
25]
where ∇ appears for the Levi–Civta connection.
An almost contact metric manifold is a Kenmotsu manifold, if and only if
for any vector field
on
.
For a
-dimensional Kenmotsu manifold
, we have
where
Q is the Ricci operator related to the Ricci tensor
S of type
by
.
A Kenmotsu manifold
is called a
-Einstein manifold if its Ricci tensor
satisfies [
25]
where
and
are smooth functions on
. If
, then
reduces to an Einstein manifold.
A Kenmotsu manifold
is called weakly
-Einstein if
for some smooth function
. Here,
is defined by
and
(called the
-Ricci tensor of
) is the symmetric part of
, such that
where
is the
type 🟉-Ricci tensor of
. If the function
in (
15) is a real number, then
is called
-Einstein manifold [
28].
Now we recall some special curvature tensors, viz., the projective (or the Weyl projective), the concircular and the
-projective curvature tensors that have many physical applications in geometry, physics and theory of relativity (see [
29,
30,
31]).
The projective curvature tensor
P, the concircular curvature tensor
and the
-projective curvature tensor
of a
-dimensional Kenmotsu manifold
are respectively defined by
and
for any vector fields
on
. Here,
r is the scalar curvature of
. If
,
and
, then the manifold
is called an
-projectively flat, a concircularly flat, and a projectively flat, respectively. Moreover, (
17) implies that the manifold
is projectively flat if and only if it is of constant curvature.
A Kenmotsu manifold , is said to be
- (i)
-projectively semisymmetric if ,
- (ii)
--projectively semisymmetric if ,
for all .
3. Kenmotsu Manifolds Satisfying Certain Flatness and -Semisymmetric Conditions
In this section, first we study the projectively flat, the concircularly flat and the -projectively flat Kenmotsu manifolds and prove that the 🟉-Ricci tensor of these flat Kenmotsu manifolds is symmetric and these flat manifolds are -Einstein, whereas the 🟉-Ricci tensor of the concircularly flat Kenmotsu manifold is symmetric and the manifold is weakly -Einstein. Moreover, we study -projectively semisymmetric and --projectively semisymmetric Kenmotsu manifolds and prove that the 🟉-Ricci tensor of these semisymmetric Kenmotsu manifolds is symmetric and these semisymmetric manifolds are -Einstein.
First we prove the following result.
Theorem 1. Let be a -dimensional projectively flat Kenmotsu manifold, then of is symmetric and the manifold is φ-Einstein.
Proof. We consider that the manifold
is projectively flat, then the Equation (
17) turns to
for any vector fields
on
. By replacing
in (
20), we have
which by taking the inner product with
provides
for any vector field
on
.
Let
be an orthonormal basis (called
-basis) of the tangent space
, for all
. Putting
in (
21) and summing over
k , we can easily compute
Replacing
by
in (
17) and then using (
8) and (
9) we arrive at
Now, taking the inner product of (
23) with
and using (
2) one immediately has
It follows from (
22) and (
24) that
Interchanging the roles of
and
in (
25) provides
Subtracting (
26) from (
25) yields
. This means that
of
is a symmetric tensor. Therefore, we obtain
where we have used the Equations (
16), (
25) and (
26). Thus,
is a
-Einstein manifold, which completes the proof. □
The next theorem gives a necessary condition for a Kenmotsu manifold to be weakly -Einstein.
Theorem 2. If is a -dimensional concircularly flat Kenmotsu manifold, then of is symmetric and the manifold is weakly φ-Einstein.
Proof. Let
be a concircularly flat Kenmotsu manifold. Then, the Equation (
18) transforms to
for any vector fields
on
.
Taking the inner product on both sides of (
27) with
we have
for any vector fields
on
.
Now, by replacing
by
and
by
in (
28) we have
Keeping in mind the
-basis and putting
in (
29) and then summing over
k , we can easily compute
from which it can be seen that
of
is symmetric.
Now, from (
15), (
16) and (
30) we find
where
. Therefore,
is weakly
-Einstein. □
As a direct consequence of the Theorem 2, we have the following.
Corollary 1. If is a -dimensional concircularly flat Kenmotsu manifold whose scalar curvature is constant, then is φ-Einstein.
Theorem 3. If is a -dimensional -projectively flat Kenmotsu manifold, then of is symmetric and the manifold is φ-Einstein.
Proof. Let
be an
-projectively flat Kenmotsu manifold. Then, the Equation (
19) takes the form
for any vector fields
on
.
Taking the inner product of (
31) with
we lead to
Moreover, by replacing
by
in (
32), we get
Now, considering the
-basis and putting
in (
33), then taking summation over
k , we easily obtain
Taking
in place of
in (
31) and utilizing (
8), (
9), (
11) we find
which by taking the inner product with
and then using (
2) and (
9) leads to
By means of (
35), the Equation (
34) turns to
from which it can be seen that
of
is symmetric. By considering (
36) in (
16), it follows that
Thus we get the desired result. □
Now we prove the following result.
Theorem 4. If is a -dimensional φ-projectively semisymmetric Kenmotsu manifold, then of is symmetric and the manifold is φ-Einstein.
Proof. Let
be a
-projectively semisymmetric Kenmotsu manifold, i.e.,
satisfies the condition
. This implies that
for any vector fields
on
.
In view of (
17), (
37) takes the form
which by taking the inner product with
becomes
By using the
-basis and plugging
in (
39), then taking summation over
k , after a straightforward calculation we find
Now by putting
in (
38) and then using (
4), (
8) and (
9), we obtain
which together with (
40) takes the form
From the Equations (
41) and (
42), our result follows. □
Theorem 5. If is a -dimensional φ--projectively semisymmetric Kenmotsu manifold, then of is symmetric and the manifold is φ-Einstein.
Proof. Let
be a
-
-projectively semisymmetric Kenmotsu manifold, i.e.,
satisfies the condition
. The condition
implies that
for any vector fields
on
.
Keeping in mind (
19), the Equation (
43) takes the form
By putting
in (
44) and recalling (
4), (
8), (
9), (
11), we have
which by taking the inner product with
provides
Replacing
by
in (
45) and by virtue of (
2), (
9) we deduce
which yields
Now taking the inner product of (
44) with
we have
for any vector field
on
.
By substituting (
47) in (
48) we have
Considering the
-basis and putting
in (
49) and then taking summation over
k , after straightforward computation we obtain
from which, in view of (
12) and (
46), we easily obtain
which by using in (
16) gives
Our claim follows from the last two equations. □
4. 🟉--Ricci Solitons on Kenmotsu Manifolds
There are many classes of manifolds studied in differential geometry. One of them includes Einstein manifolds. The manifolds where the Ricci tensor is proportional to the metric tensor are called Einstein manifolds. Because the Ricci tensor is a part of Einstein’s famous field equations, thus the manifolds endowed with the Ricci tensor are closely related to Einstein’s field equations. That’s why these manifolds are very important in both Riemannian geometry and the general theory of relativity. It is emphasized that the results of the present paper are important because they are reduced to the Einstein manifold.
In this section, we consider Kenmotsu manifolds endowed with 🟉--Ricci solitons, and we obtain some significant results concerning such manifolds. To prove our next theorems, we use the following lemma.
Lemma 1 ([
6])
. In a -dimensional Kenmotsu manifold, the 🟉-Ricci tensor is given byfor any vector fields on . Now, first we prove the following theorem:
Theorem 6. Let be a -dimensional Kenmotsu manifold endowed with 🟉-η-Ricci soliton . Then the manifold is Einstein as well as φ-Einstein.
Proof. Considering
as a 🟉-
-Ricci soliton on
, then in view of (
1), we have
for any vector fields
on
.
By using (
6), (
14) and (
50), the Equation (
51) turns to
Taking
in (
52) and making use of (
10), we get
By taking the covariant derivative of (
52) with respect to
and keeping in mind (
6), we are led to
where
With the help of (
6), (
7) and (
9) it can be easily seen that
By the cyclic rearrangement of
and
in (
54), we have
and
By adding the Equations (
54)–(
57), we have
Now taking
in (
58) and using (
13), we arrive at
Keeping in mind the
-basis and putting
in (
59) and then summing over
k , we obtain
Setting
in (
54) and using (
55), we obtain
from which we obtain
By combining (
60) and (
62), it follows that
, and hence
. By using this fact together with (
53), the Equation (
52) leads to
which informs us that
is Einstein.
Furthermore, substituting (
63) in (
50) we are led to
Hence, the proof is completed. □
Theorem 7. Let be a -dimensional Kenmotsu manifold endowed with 🟉-η-Ricci soliton such that J is pointwise collinear with ζ. Then E is weakly φ-Einstein.
Proof. Let
J be pointwise collinear with
, that is,
for some function
b. Then, one can calculate
for any vector fields
on
.
As
is 🟉-
-Ricci soliton on
, then from (
1) and (
64) we have
Putting
in (
65) and then utilizing (
10) and (
50) we find
Again putting
in (
65) and then from (
9), (
50) and (
66), we obtain
which together with (
65) leads to
Thus, from (
16) and (
68) we have
which completes the proof. □
Now, we present an example of three-dimensional Kenmotsu manifold to verify some of our results.
Example 1 ([
32])
. We consider a three-dimensional Riemannian manifold , where are the usual coordinates in . Let and be the linearly independent vector fields on given by Let
g be the Riemannian metric defined by
and given by
Now let the 1-form
and the
-tensor field
be defined by
for all
on
.
The linearity property of
and
g yields
for all
on
. Therefore,
is an almost contact metric manifold of dimension 3 for
.
By direct calculations, we obtain
By the use of Koszul’s formula for the Riemannian metric
g, we obtain
Therefore, by using the above values, it can be easily verified that is a 3-dimensional Kenmotsu manifold.
The following components of
R can be easily obtain
which gives
With the help of (
50), we find
for all
.
Now taking
in (
1), we have
for any vector fields
on
. Taking
in (
70) and summing over
and then using (
69) yields
Then, the data
satisfying the Equation (
1) is a 🟉-
-Ricci soliton with
and
on
. This result verifies Theorem 6. Moreover, we remark that this example supports Theorems 1–3.