Nice pseudo-Riemannian nilsolitons (Q2071021)

Given a Lie algebra \(\tilde{\mathfrak{g}}\) with a fixed metric, a pseudo-Iwasawa decomposition is an orthogonal splitting \(\tilde{\mathfrak{g}}=\mathfrak{g}\oplus \mathfrak{a}\), with \(\mathfrak{g}\) a nilpotent ideal and \(\mathfrak{a}\) an abelian subalgebra acting on \(\mathfrak{g}\) by self-adjoint derivations. If \(\mathfrak{g}\) is further assumed to be nonunimodular and endowed with an Einstein metric of nonzero scalar curvature, then \(\mathfrak{g}\) is the nilradical and the induced metric on the nilpotent Lie group satisfies the equation \[ \mathrm{Ric} = \lambda \mathrm{Id}+D \ \ \ \ \ D\in \mathrm{Der}(\mathfrak{g}). \] Such metrics are called nilsolitons and play an important role since they are soliton solutions for the Ricci flow. The paper under review produces a lot of examples of such nilsoliton metrics. The authors consider Lie algebras that admit a nice basis \(\{ e_{i}\}\) such that each \([e_{i}, e_{j}]\) and each \(e_{i}\lrcorner \mathrm{d}e^{j}\) is a multiple of an element of the basis. They then consider diagonal metrics in a nice basis and classify those that are nilsolitons up to dimension \(9\) (with some additional assumptions in dimension \(8\) and \(9\)). The classification is possible because the problem of determining whether a nice Lie algebra admits a diagonal nilsoliton metric can be reduced to solving a set of linear equalities and inequalities together with polynomial equations.