Natural Ricci Solitons on tangent and unit tangent bundles

Abstract: Considering pseudo-Riemannian $g$-natural metrics on tangent bundles, we prove that the condition of being Ricci soliton is hereditary in the sense that a Ricci soliton structure on the tangent bundle gives rise to a Ricci soliton structure on the base manifold. Restricting ourselves to some class of pseudo-Riemannian $g$-natural metrics, we show that the tangent bundle is a Ricci soliton if and only if the base manifold is flat and the potential vector field is a complete lift of a conformal vector field. We give then a classification of conformal vector fields on a flat Riemannian manifold. When unit tangent bundles over a constant curvature Riemannian manifold are endowed with pseudo-Riemannian Kaluza-Klein type metric, we give a classification of Ricci soliton structures whose potential vector fields are fiber-preserving, inferring the existence of some of them which are non Einstein.