A Remarkable Property of Concircular Vector Fields on a Riemannian Manifold

Abstract

In this paper, we show that, given a non-trivial concircular vector field u on a Riemannian manifold ( M , g ) with potential function f, there exists a unique smooth function ρ on M that connects u to the gradient of potential function ∇ f . We call the connecting function of the concircular vector field u. This connecting function is shown to be a main ingredient in obtaining characterizations of n-sphere S n ( c ) and the Euclidean space E n . We also show that the connecting function influences on a topology of the Riemannian manifold.

Keywords

• concircular vector field
• connecting function
• Ricci curvature
• isometric to sphere
• isometric to Euclidean space