A new point of view on the solutions to the Einstein constraint equations with arbitrary mean curvature and small TT-tensor

In this paper, we give a construction of the solutions to the Einstein constraint equations using the well-known conformal method. Our method gives a result similar to the one in [14, 15, 21], namely existence when the so-called TT-tensor σ is small and the Yamabe invariant of the manifold is positive. The method we describe is, however, much simpler than the original method and allows easy extensions to several other problems. Some non-existence results are also considered. (paper)