On low-dimensional manifolds with isometric \(\mathrm {SO}_{0}(p, q)\)-actions (Q1928552)

R. Zimmer's program concerns the relationship between the structure of the fundamental group of a manifold and that of the automorphism group of a geometric structure on the manifold. Gromov introduced the notion of rigid geometric structures and proved several deep results which have had strong influence on the geometry and dynamics of group actions. This paper deals with the pseudo-Riemannian setting of Zimmer's program. More specifically, let \(G\) be a non-compact connected simple Lie group acting by isometries on a connected analytic pseudo-Riemannian manifold \(M\) with finite volume. The authors observe that in case \(M\) is complete and weakly irreducible with non-transitive \(G\)-action but with a dense orbit, the dimension of~\(M\) is bounded from below by \(\dim G+m(\mathfrak g),\) where \(m(\mathfrak g)\) denotes the smallest dimension of a non-trivial representation of the Lie algebra \(\mathfrak g\) of \(G\) that admits a non-degenerate symmetric invariant bilinear form. In the special case of \(G\) being the universal cover of \(\mathrm{SO}_0(p,q)\) with \(p+q\geq5\), \(p\), \(q\geq1\), they prove rigidity in case the bound is attained, namely, up to a finite covering \(M\) is a quotient of either \(\mathrm{SO}_0(p+1,q)\) or \(\mathrm{SO}_0(p,q+1)\). The action comes from a non-trivial homomorphism and the pseudo-Riemannian is essentially the Killing form.