Symmetries of parabolic geometries (Q734718): Difference between revisions

The classical concept of an affine symmetric space has an obvious analog for other geometric structures. One requires that on a manifold \(M\) endowed with the given type of structure, for any point \(x\in M\) there is an automorphism \(s_x:M\to M\) of the structure, for which \(x\) is a fixed point and \(T_xs_x\) is the negative of the identity. In the article under review, this is studied in the case of so-called AHS-structures or \(|1|\)-graded parabolic geometries. This is a class of second order structures which can equivalently be described as Cartan geometries whose homogeneous models are certain generalized flag manifolds and contains examples like conformal structures, classical projective structures and almost quaternionic structures. Compared to the case of affine structures, there arises the additional difficulty that morphisms of AHS-structures are not determined by their one-jet in a point. Hence an AHS-structure may admit many different symmetries at one point and a priori symmetries of AHS-structures are not necessarily involutive. After a short review of AHS structures, the author starts by studying symmetries of the homogeneous model, showing that if there is one such symmetry then there always are infinitely many of them at each point. He gives an explicit description of the symmetries at the base point. Similarly to the affine case, it is next shown that symmetric geometries must be torsion free and other curvature quantities of odd degree have to vanish, too. This already implies flatness for several types of AHS-structures. For the remaining cases, the author uses (normal) Weyl-structures to study symmetries. It is shown that symmetries of AHS-structures are always involutive, and that in most cases there can be only one symmetry in a point with non-zero curvature.