Rigidity of complete manifolds with parallel Cotton tensor

The aim of this paper is to show some rigidity results for complete Riemannian manifolds with parallel Cotton tensor. In particular, we prove that any compact manifold of dimension $$n\ge 3$$ with parallel Cotton tensor and positive constant scalar curvature is isometric to a finite quotient of $${\mathbb {S}}^n$$ under a pointwise or integral pinching condition. Moreover, a rigidity theorem for stochastically complete manifolds with parallel Cotton tensor is also given. The proofs rely mainly on curvature elliptic estimates and the weak maximum principle.