CR-twistor spaces over manifolds with \(G_2\)- and spin(7)-structures (Q6156106): Difference between revisions

\textit{C. R. LeBrun} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 284, 601--616 (1984; Zbl 0513.53006)] constructed a 5-dimensional Levi nondegenerate CR manifold, which is locally embeddable as a real hypersurface in \(\mathbb{C}^3\), as a sphere bundle over an arbitrary conformal Riemannian manifold of dimension \(3\), naming it a twistor CR manifold. \textit{M. Verbitsky} [Differ. Geom. Appl. 29, No. 1, 101--107 (2011; Zbl 1214.53045)] generalized this construction for 7-dimensional \(G_2\)-manifolds \(M\), obtaining an almost CR-structure on the sphere bundle of unit tangent vectors and showing that this is formally integrable if and only if \(M\) is a holonomy \(G_2\)-manifold. In this paper the authors unify and generalize this kind of CR-twistor space constructions to the case where a Riemannian manifold \(M\) has a \emph{vector cross product} structure, translating the formal integrability condition of the CR-structure in terms of a torsion tensor on the twistor space. At the end of the paper some open problems are discussed.