The stability of standard homogeneous Einstein manifolds

Abstract

Back in 1985, Wang and Ziller obtained a complete classification of all homogeneous spaces of compact simple Lie groups on which the standard or Killing metric is Einstein. The list consists, beyond isotropy irreducible spaces, of 12 infinite families (two of them are actually conceptual constructions) and 22 isolated examples. We study in this paper the nature of each of these Einstein metrics as a critical point of the scalar curvature functional.