Intrinsic holonomy and curved cosets of Cartan geometries (Q2147380)

The author gives an intrinsic notion of curved cosets for arbitrary Cartan geometries. In particular, he introduces an intrinsic definition of holonomy group which is shown to coincide precisely with the standard definition of the holonomy group for Cartan geometries in terms of an associated principal connection. This allows to make more explicit the analogy between Cartan geometries and Lie groups.. Most of the results in the paper are motivated by analogous results for Lie groups. As an application the author shows a generalization of the de Rham decomposition theorem for Riemannian manifolds and a characterization of inessential automorphism groups for parabolic geometries.