De Rham 2-cohomology of real flag manifolds (Q2330822)

In this paper the authors compute the second de Rham cohomology group of the real flag manifold \(\mathbb F_\Theta=G/P_\Theta\) associated to a non-compact real simple Lie group \(G\) and its parabolic subgroup \(P_\Theta\) (which is a closed subgroup determined by a set \(\Theta\) of simple restricted roots of the Lie algebra \(\mathrm{Lie}(G)\)). The vanishing of this cohomology group is an obstruction for the existence of a symplectic structure on the manifold, and motivated by this, the authors show that if \(\mathrm{Lie}(G)\) does not contain a root of rank \(2\), then \(H_{dR}^2(\mathbb F_\Theta;\mathbb R)=0\). If there are roots of rank \(2\) in \(\mathrm{Lie}(G)\), they detect a basis for \(H_{dR}^2(\mathbb F_\Theta;\mathbb R)\) by applying the Weil construction to the principal fiber bundle \(K\rightarrow\mathbb F_\Theta\) with structure group \(P_\Theta\cap K\), where \(K\) is a maximal compact subgroup of \(G\).