Abstract
A Ricci almost soliton whose associated vector field is projective is shown to have vanishing Cotton tensor, divergence-free Bach tensor and Ricci tensor as conformal Killing. For the compact case, a sharp inequality is obtained in terms of scalar curvature.We show that every complete gradient Ricci soliton is isometric to the Riemannian product of a Euclidean space and an Einstein space. A complete
-contact Ricci almost soliton whose associated vector field is projective is compact Einstein and Sasakian.