Gradient Shrinking Ricci Solitons and Modified Sectional Curvature

We investigate four-dimensional gradient shrinking Ricci solitons with positive modified sectional curvature.

Our first main result shows that if the norm of the self-dual Weyl tensor and the scalar curvature satisfy a certain sharp pinching condition (closely related, in a precise sense, to that of Kähler metric), then the soliton is necessarily locally Kähler.

We further obtain a characterization theorem and a weighted integral gap result for compact gradient shrinking Ricci solitons with bounded modified sectional curvature.

In addition, we establish a Hitchin-Thorpe type inequality for compact four-dimensional Ricci solitons, providing new topological constraints on such manifolds.