Lie groups and twistor spaces (Q1068399)

The construction of harmonic maps from the 2-sphere to a symmetric space is nowadays heavily influenced by twistor theory. It has its origins in pre-twistor days with the paper of \textit{E. Calabi} [''Quelques applications de l'analyse complexe aux surfaces d'aire minima'', Topics in Complex Manifolds, Presses Univ. Montréal, 59-81 (1967)] but received its main impetus from the work of \textit{Din} and \textit{Zakrzewski} [''General classical solutions in the \(CP^{n-1}\) model'', Nuclear Phys. B 174, No.2-3, 397-406 (1980)] in the case where the target space is complex projective space. The paper reviewed here starts with the twistor space, in the naive sense, of a symmetric space: namely the bundle of all orthogonal complex structures. The natural complex structures on this are rarely integrable. The author considers the Nijenhuis tensor which measures this lack of integrability, and an analogous tensor measuring the failure of a certain complex plane field to be holomorphic, and computes the zero locus to produce holomorphic twistor spaces for which horizontal holomorphic maps define harmonic maps to the underlying symmetric space. He finds a class of complex manifolds which are all homogeneous under the action of the isometry group of the symmetric space, and coincides in special cases with those considered by other authors. The classification produced uses the standard methods of symmetric space theory and links up with early work of Cartan. In a final section a different family of twistor spaces over inner Riemannian symmetric spaces is constructed. Various authors have independently approached the problem of a general setting for the situation of harmonic maps factoring through a holomorphic map into a twistor space. One such, which produces similar results to the present paper, and depends on the classification of 3- symmetric spaces by Wolf and Gray is by \textit{S. Salamon} [''Harmonic and holomorphic maps'' in Geometry Seminar L. Bianchi II, Lect. Notes Math. 1164 (1986)].