A gluing construction of singular solutions for a fully non-linear equation in conformal geometry

In this paper we produce families of complete, non-compact Riemannian metrics with positive constant ₂--curvature on the sphere Sⁿ, n>4, with a prescribed singular set given by a disjoint union of closed submanifolds whose dimension is positive and strictly less than (n-n-2) /2. The ₂--curvature in conformal geometry is defined as the second elementary symmetric polynomial of the eigenvalues of the Schouten tensor, which yields a fully non-linear PDE for the conformal factor. We show that the classical gluing method of Mazzeo-Pacard (JDG 1996) for the scalar curvature still works in the fully non-linear setting. This is a consequence of the conformal properties of the ₂ equation, which imply that the linearized operator has good mapping properties in weighted spaces. Our method could be potentially generalized to any ₖ, 2 k<n/2, nevertheless, the numerology becomes too involved.