Complex manifold

In differential geometry, a complex manifold is a canonically oriented (not just orientable: a biholomor-
manifold with an atlas of charts to the open unit disk[1] in phic map to (a subset of) Cn gives an orientation, as bi-
Cn , such that the transition maps are holomorphic. holomorphic maps are orientation-preserving).
The term complex manifold is variously used to mean a
complex manifold in the sense above (which can be spec-
ified as an integrable complex manifold), and an almost 2 Examples of complex manifolds
complex manifold.
• Riemann surfaces.

• Calabi-Yau manifolds.
1 Implications of complex struc-
ture • The Cartesian product of two complex manifolds.

• The inverse image of any noncritical value of a holo-

Since holomorphic functions are much more rigid than
morphic map.
smooth functions, the theories of smooth and complex
manifolds have very different flavors: compact complex
manifolds are much closer to algebraic varieties than to
differentiable manifolds.
2.1 Smooth complex algebraic varieties
For example, the Whitney embedding theorem tells us Smooth complex algebraic varieties are complex mani-
that every smooth n-dimensional manifold can be embed- folds, including:
ded as a smooth submanifold of R2n , whereas it is “rare”
for a complex manifold to have a holomorphic embedding
into Cn . Consider for example any compact connected • Complex vector spaces.
complex manifold M: any holomorphic function on it is
• Complex projective spaces,[2] Pn (C).
constant by Liouville’s theorem. Now if we had a holo-
morphic embedding of M into Cn , then the coordinate
• Complex Grassmannians.
functions of Cn would restrict to nonconstant holomor-
phic functions on M, contradicting compactness, except
• Complex Lie groups such as GL(n, C) or Sp(n, C).
in the case that M is just a point. Complex manifolds
that can be embedded in Cn are called Stein manifolds
and form a very special class of manifolds including, for Similarly, the quaternionic analogs of these are also com-
example, smooth complex affine algebraic varieties. plex manifolds.
The classification of complex manifolds is much more
subtle than that of differentiable manifolds. For exam-
ple, while in dimensions other than four, a given topolog- 2.2 Simply connected
ical manifold has at most finitely many smooth structures,
a topological manifold supporting a complex structure The simply connected 1-dimensional complex manifolds
can and often does support uncountably many complex are isomorphic to either:
structures. Riemann surfaces, two dimensional manifolds
equipped with a complex structure, which are topologi- • Δ, the unit disk in C
cally classified by the genus, are an important example
of this phenomenon. The set of complex structures on • C, the complex plane
a given orientable surface, modulo biholomorphic equiv-
alence, itself forms a complex algebraic variety called a • Ĉ, the Riemann sphere
moduli space, the structure of which remains an area of
active research. Note that there are inclusions between these as Δ ⊆ C ⊆
Since the transition maps between charts are biholomor- Ĉ, but that there are no non-constant maps in the other
phic, complex manifolds are, in particular, smooth and direction, by Liouville’s theorem.

1
2 6 SEE ALSO

3 Disk vs. space vs. polydisk currently known whether or not the 6-sphere has a com-
plex structure.) Using an almost complex structure we
The following spaces are different as complex mani- can make sense of holomorphic maps and ask about the
folds, demonstrating the more rigid geometric character existence of holomorphic coordinates on the manifold.
of complex manifolds (compared to smooth manifolds): The existence of holomorphic coordinates is equivalent
to saying the manifold is complex (which is what the chart
definition says).
• complex space Cn .
Tensoring the tangent bundle with the complex num-
• the unit disk or open ball bers we get the complexified tangent bundle, on which
multiplication by complex numbers makes sense (even
if we started with a real manifold). The eigenvalues of
an almost complex structure are ±i and the eigenspaces
{z ∈ Cn : ∥z∥ < 1} . form sub-bundles denoted by T 0,1 M and T 1,0 M. The
Newlander–Nirenberg theorem shows that an almost
• the polydisk complex structure is actually a complex structure pre-
cisely when these subbundles are involutive, i.e., closed
under the Lie bracket of vector fields, and such an almost
complex structure is called integrable.
{z = (z1 , z2 , . . . , zn ) ∈ Cn : |zi | < 1, for all i = 1, . . . , n} .

5 Kähler and Calabi–Yau mani-

4 Almost complex structures
Main article: Almost complex manifold
An almost complex structure on a real manifold is a GL(n,
C)-structure (in the sense of G-structures) – that is, the
tangent bundle is equipped with a linear complex struc-
ture.
Concretely, this is an endomorphism of the tangent bun-
dle whose square is −I; this endomorphism is analogous to
multiplication by the imaginary number i, and is denoted
J (to avoid confusion with the identity matrix I). An al-
most complex manifold is necessarily even-dimensional.
An almost complex structure is weaker than a complex
structure: any complex manifold has an almost com-
plex structure, but not every almost complex structure
comes from a complex structure. Note that every even-
dimensional real manifold has an almost complex struc-
ture defined locally from the local coordinate chart. The
question is whether this complex structure can be defined
globally. An almost complex structure that comes from
a complex structure is called integrable, and when one
wishes to specify a complex structure as opposed to an
almost complex structure, one says an integrable complex
structure. For integrable complex structures the so-called
Nijenhuis tensor vanishes. This tensor is defined on pairs
of vector fields, X, Y by
folds
One can define an analogue of a Riemannian metric for
complex manifolds, called a Hermitian metric. Like
a Riemannian metric, a Hermitian metric consists of a
smoothly varying, positive definite inner product on the
tangent bundle, which is Hermitian with respect to the
complex structure on the tangent space at each point.
As in the Riemannian case, such metrics always exist in
abundance on any complex manifold. If the skew sym-
metric part of such a metric is symplectic, i.e. closed and
nondegenerate, then the metric is called Kähler. Kähler
structures are much more difficult to come by and are
much more rigid.
Examples of Kähler manifolds include smooth projective
varieties and more generally any complex submanifold of
a Kähler manifold. The Hopf manifolds are examples of
complex manifolds that are not Kähler. To construct one,
take a complex vector space minus the origin and consider
the action of the group of integers on this space by multi-
plication by exp(n). The quotient is a complex manifold
whose first Betti number is one, so by the Hodge theory,
it cannot be Kähler.
A Calabi–Yau manifold can be defined as a compact
Ricci-flat Kähler manifold or equivalently one whose first
Chern class vanishes.

6 See also
NJ (X, Y ) = [X, Y ]+J[JX, Y ]+J[X, JY ]−[JX, JY ] .
• Complex dimension
For example, the 6-dimensional sphere S6 has a natural
almost complex structure arising from the fact that it is • Quaternionic manifold
the orthogonal complement of i in the unit sphere of the
octonions, but this is not a complex structure. (It is not • Real-complex manifold
 3

7 Footnotes
[1] One must use the open unit disk in Cn as the model space
instead of Cn because these are not isomorphic, unlike for
real manifolds.

[2] This means that all complex projective spaces are ori-
entable, in contrast to the real case

8 References
• Kodaira, Kunihiko. Complex Manifolds and Defor-
mation of Complex Structures. Classics in Mathe-
matics. Springer. ISBN 3-540-22614-1.
4 9 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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