Conformal flatness of compact three-dimensional Cotton-parallel manifolds

A three-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifold is called essentially conformally symmetric (ECS) if its Cotton tensor is parallel but nowhere-vanishing. In this note we prove that three-dimensional ECS manifolds must be noncompact or, equivalently, that every compact three-dimensional Cotton-parallel pseudo-Riemannian manifold must be conformally flat.Comment: Fixed a typo and updated a reference; this is the last author-produced version before publicatio