On Ricci negative solvmanifolds and their nilradicals

In the homogeneous case, the only curvature behavior which is still far from being understood is Ricci negative. In this paper, we study which nilpotent Lie algebras admit a Ricci negative solvable extension. Different unexpected behaviors were found. On the other hand, given a nilpotent Lie algebra, we consider the space of all the derivations such that the corresponding solvable extension has a metric with negative Ricci curvature. Using the nice convexity properties of the moment map for the variety of nilpotent Lie algebras, we obtain a useful characterization of such derivations and some applications.