On Nilpotent and Solvable Quasi-Einstein Manifolds

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the structure of nilpotent Lie groups and unimodular solvable Lie groups with quasi-Einstein metric $(M,g,X)$ when $X$ is a left-invariant vector field. We define such a metric as a totally left-invariant quasi-Einstein metric. We prove that any non-flat unimodular solvable Lie group $S$ with a totally left-invariant quasi-Einstein metric, must have one-dimensional center. Along with this, if the adjoint action $ad_a$ of $S$ is a normal derivation, then $S$ must be standard, and have a quasi-Einstein nilpotent group as its nilradical. We also establish some necessary conditions for a nilpotent Lie group to be totally left-invariant quasi-Einstein. We prove that any left-invariant metric on Heisenberg Lie group is quasi-Einstein, and these are the only two-step nilpotent Lie groups that admit a totally left-invariant quasi-Einstein metric. We also obtain a structure theorem for quasi-Einstein compact manifolds $\Gamma\backslash G,$ where $G$ is unimodular solvable and $\Gamma$ is its discrete cocompact subgroup. As a consequence of these results, we prove that the only non-Abelian nilpotent Lie groups that admit a totally left-invariant quasi-Einstein metric and a discrete compact quotient, up to dimension six, are the 3-dimensional and 5-dimensional Heisenberg groups.