Rational curves, Dynkin diagrams and Fano manifolds with nef tangent bundle (Q2339316)

In the paper under review, the authors consider complex Fano manifolds \(X\), having nef tangent bundle \(T_X\). It is a famous conjecture of Campana and Peternell that in this case \(X\) must be a rational homogeneous space. The authors prove this conjecture for those \(X\), which are of \textit{Flag Type} (or \textit{FT} for short), i.e. every Mori contraction of \(X\) has \(1\)-dimensional fibers (to begin with note that all extremal contractions on the initial \(X\) are of fiber type). The authors also treat the so-called \textit{conjecture of initiality of FT-manifolds}. The latter asserts that every Fano manifold \(Y\), which is not a product of varieties and has \(T_Y\) nef, is dominated by some FT-manifold \(X\) with connected Dynkin diagram \(\mathcal{D}(X)\) (cf. below). Note that a partial converse does hold (see Proposition 5 in the text) -- for if \(M \longrightarrow X\) is a contraction, where \(M\) is a Fano manifold with \(T_M\) nef, then there exists a variety \(Y\) such that \(M = X \times Y\). The authors' method is based on the notion of \textit{Dynkin diagram} (denoted \(\mathcal{D}(X)\)) for \(X\). This is defined in terms of intersection theory on \(X\) (see subsection 3.2) and mimics the similar notion for homogenous spaces. More precisely, the authors show first (Theorem 5) that \(X\) is indeed a homogeneous space, provided it has Picard number two (the argument relies heavily on Theorem 1.1 from \textit{K. Watanabe} [J. Algebra 414, 105--119 (2014; Zbl 1304.14054)]). The latter fact is used (Corollary 1) to show that the intersection matrix between \(1\)- and \((\dim X - 1)\)-cycles on any FT \(X\) is a (generalized) Cartan matrix. Then one defines the Dynkin graph as usual (cf. Definition 3). After all these preparations the authors prove their main result Theorem 1. Every (connected) \(\mathcal{D}(X)\) as above is realized by some semi-simple finite-dimensional Lie algebra. This is proved in Section 4 by induction on the Picard number of \(X\). The authors also prove in Section 5 that if \(G \slash B\) is a homogeneous variety, associated with \(\mathcal{D}(X)\), then \(\dim X \leq G \slash B\). The paper concludes by proving that \(X \simeq \mathbb{P}(T_{\mathbb{P}^n})\), \(n \geq 2\), whenever \(\mathcal{D}(X)\) is of type \(A_n\).