CM-stability of blow-ups and canonical metrics

An asymptotic formula for the Tian-Paul CM-line of a flat family blown-up at a flat closed sub-scheme is given. As an application we prove that the blow-up of a polarized manifold along a (relatively) Chow-unstable submanifold admits no (extremal) constant scalar curvature Kahler metrics in classes making the exceptional divisors sufficiently small. Moreover a geometric characterization of relatively Chow-unstable configuration of points in the projective space is given. From this we get new examples of classes admitting no extremal Kahler metric also in the case of the projective plane blown-up at a finite set of points.