Fano contact manifolds and nilpotent orbits (Q1281751)

A contact structure on a complex manifold \(M\) is a co-rank 1 subbundle \(F \subseteq T_M\) such that the bilinear form on \(F\) with values in the quotient line bundle \(L = T_M/F\) deduced from the Lie bracket on \(T_M\) is everywhere non-degenerate. It is conjectured that every Fano contact manifold is isomorphic to the unique closed orbit \({\mathbf P}{\mathcal O}_{min}\) with respect to the adjoint group action on \({\mathbf P}({\mathfrak g})\), where \({\mathfrak g}\) is a simple complex Lie algebra and \({\mathbf P}{\mathcal O}_{min}\) is the projectivization of the minimal nilpotent orbit \({\mathcal O}_{min} \subseteq {\mathfrak g}\). The author solves this conjecture under the extra conditions that the group of contact automorphisms of \(M\) is reductive and the image of the rational map \(M \cdot \rightarrow {\mathbf P}(H^0(M, L)^*)\) associated to \(L\) has maximum dimension; the work of R. Brylinski and B. Kostant is used in the proof. The importance: this conjecture would imply the long conjectured statement in Riemannian Geometry ``every compact quaternion-Kähler manifold with positive scalar curvature is isomorphic to a so called Wolf space'' in view of the work of LeBrun and Salamon.