Quaternion Kähler flat manifolds (Q5945500)

A quaternionic Kähler manifold is a Riemannian manifold of dimension \(4n\) whose holonomy group is contained in the group in \(\text{Sp} (n)\text{Sp}(1)\). Ricci flat quaternionic Kähler manifolds include hyper-Kähler manifolds, that is, those with full holonomy group contained in \(\text{Sp}(n)\). In this paper, the authors give a general method to construct hyper-Kähler and quaternionic Kähler flat manifolds. Given any Bieberbach group \(\Gamma\) with holonomy group \(F\) and translation lattice \(\Lambda\), and given \(\phi: F \rightarrow {\mathbb R}^n/\Lambda\), a 1-cocycle modulo \(\Lambda\), the authors consider \(d_{\phi}\Gamma\), a Bieberbach group with holonomy group \(F\) and such that the holonomy group commutes with an invariant orthogonal complex structure \(J\) on \({\mathbb R}^{n}\). The authors enlarge \(d_{\phi}\Gamma\) into a Bieberbach group with holonomy group \(F\times {\mathbb Z}_{2}\), in such a way that the new element of order 2 in the holonomy group anticommutes with \(J\). Then, by applying these procedures twice, the authors obtain families of hyper-Kähler flat manifolds and quaternionic Kähler flat manifolds. For technical reasons the authors consider only Bieberbach groups with holonomy group \({\mathbb Z}^k_2\). Finally they give many families of quaternionic Kähler manifolds of dimension \(n \geq 8\), which admit no Kähler (respectively, hyper-Kähler) structures.