On the Sign of the Curvature of a Contact Metric Manifold

Abstract

In this expository article, we discuss the author’s conjecture that an associated metric for a given contact form on a contact manifold of dimension ≥5 must have some positive curvature. In dimension 3, the standard contact structure on the 3-torus admits a flat associated metric; we also discuss a local example, due to Krouglov, where there exists a neighborhood of negative curvature on a particular 3-dimensional contact metric manifold. In the last section, we review some results on contact metric manifolds with negative sectional curvature for sections containing the Reeb vector field.

Keywords

• contact manifolds
• associated metrics
• curvature