Conformal deformations of integral pinched 3-manifolds

In this paper we prove that, under an explicit integral pinching assumption between the L 2 -norm of the Ricci curvature and the L 2 -norm of the scalar curvature, a closed 3-manifold with positive scalar curvature admits a conformal metric of positive Ricci curvature. In particular, using a result of Hamilton, this implies that the manifold is diffeomorphic to a quotient of S 3 . The proof of the main result of the paper is based on ideas developed in an article by M. Gursky and J. Viaclovsky.