3-quasi-Sasakian manifolds (Q927173)

Quasi-Sasakian manifolds were introduced by \textit{D. E. Blair} [J. Differ. Geom. 1, 331--345 (1967; Zbl 0163.43903)] as normal almost contact metric manifolds whose fundamental 2-form is closed. It is a unification of the notions of Sasakian and cosymplectic manifolds. The notion of almost contact metric structures leads to the notion of almost contact metric 3-structures as defined in [\textit{Y. Y. Kuo}, Tôhoku Math. J., II. Ser. 22, 325--332 (1970; Zbl 0205.25801)] and [\textit{C. Udriste}, Bull. Math. Soc. Sci. Math. Répub. Soc. Roum., Nouv. Sér. 13(61), 487--507 (1969; Zbl 0213.48205)], which is basically a triple of almost contact metric structures that satisfy a suitable version of the quaternionic identities. Such a 3-structure is said to be hyper-normal if each of the almost contact structures is normal. The authors of the paper under review then define a 3-quasi-Sasakian manifold as a manifold with a hyper-normal almost contact metric 3-structure such that the three corresponding fundamental 2-forms are closed. These manifolds are the main object of study of the paper. Their first theorem is that the distribution \(\mathcal V\) generated by the three Reeb vector fields on a 3-quasi-Sasakian manifold \(M\) is integrable and defines a totally geodesic and Riemannian foliation of \(M\). This foliation, the \textit{canonical foliation of \(M\)}, is either locally \(\roman{SO}(3)\) or \(\roman{SU}(2)\) or an abelian Lie group. The authors then prove that the three almost contact structures on \(M\) have the same rank, which is of the form \(4l + 1\) or \(4l + 3\) depending on whether the canonical foliation is locally an abelian Lie group or not. A splitting theorem for special 3-quasi-Sasakian manifolds is also included in the article under review, which shows that any such 3-quasi-Sasakian manifold is locally a product of a 3-Sasakian and a hyper-Kähler-manifold. Finally the authors show in the non-abelian compact case that the canonical distribution \(\mathcal V\) from above minimizes the corrected energy for a certain class of 3-dimensional distributions on \(M\).