Ricci Yang-Mills solitons on nilpotent Lie groups

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Ricci Yang-Mills soliton equations on nilpotent Lie groups. In the 2-step nilpotent setting, we show that these equations are strictly weaker than the Ricci soliton equations. Using techniques from Geometric Invariant Theory, we develop a procedure to build many different kinds of Ricci Yang-Mills solitons. We finish this note by producing examples of Lie groups that do not admit Ricci soliton metrics but that do admit Ricci Yang-Mills soliton metrics.