The topology of quaternionic contact manifolds (Q2254176)

In the paper under review, quaternionic contact manifolds are studied. These manifolds were introduced by \textit{O. Biquard} [Métriques d'Einstein asymptotiquement symétriques. Paris: Société Mathématique de France (2000; Zbl 0967.53030)] as the key tool to study the conformal boundaries at infinity of quaternionic Kähler manifolds. Contact quaternionic manifolds possess a connection which is adapted to the quaternionic structure and which enjoys the remarkable property that its Ricci tensor can be decomposed entirely into three torsion components. Under the assumption that the canonical vertical distribution is integrable, the author studies the effect of these torsion components on the underlying topology of the manifold. He shows how the Levi-Civita connection for a canonical family of Riemannian metrics can be computed in terms of the Biquard connection and its torsion and also establishes a general Bonnet-Myers type theorem. Next, he introduces the category of almost Einstein quaternionic manifolds, characterized by the vanishing of one component of the torsion of the Biquard connection. For these manifolds, the author derives Cartan-Hadamard type theorems using some techniques of foliation theory. In particular, when the horizontal sectional curvatures are non-positive, he shows that universal cover is either \(\mathbb{R}^{h+3}\) or \(\mathbb{R}^{h}\times S^{3}\) and the two cases can be distinguished by properties of the torsion.