Structure of homogeneous Ricci solitons and the Alekseevskii conjecture

We bring new insights into the long-standing Alekseevskii conjecture, namely that any connected homogeneous Einstein manifold of negative scalar curvature is diffeomorphic to a Euclidean space, by proving structural results which are actually valid for any homogeneous expanding Ricci soliton, and generalize many well-known results on Einstein solvmanifolds, solvsolitons and nilsolitons. We obtain that any homogeneous expanding Ricci soliton M=G/K is diffeomorphic to a product U/K x N, where U is a maximal reductive Lie subgroup of G and N is the maximal nilpotent normal subgroup of G, such that the metric restricted to N is a nilsoliton. Moreover, strong compatibility conditions between the metric and the action of U on N by conjugation must hold, including a nice formula for the Ricci operator of the metric restricted to U/K. Our main tools come from geometric invariant theory. As an application, we give many Lie theoretical characterizations of algebraic solitons, as well as a proof of the fact that the following a priori much stronger result is actually equivalent to Alekseevskii's conjecture: Any expanding algebraic soliton is diffeomorphic to a Euclidean space.