Topological parallelisms of the real projective 3-space (Q2581108)

The authors investigate parallelisms of a projective 3-space \(\Pi_3=\text{ PG}(3,{\mathbb K})\), \({\mathbb K}\) a commutative field, that is, families \textbf{P} of spreads of \(\Pi_3\) such that each line of \(\Pi_3\) is contained in exactly one spread in \textbf{P}; two lines of \(\Pi_3\) are parallel if and only if they belong to the same spread in \textbf{P}. In particular, they deal with topological parallelisms of the real projective 3-space \(\text{ PG}(3,{\mathbb R})\) in which the operation of drawing a line parallel to a given line through a given point is continuous with respect to the natural topologies on the point set and lines set of \(\text{ PG}(3,{\mathbb R})\) derived from the Grassmann manifolds of all 1- and 2-dimensional vector subspaces of \({\mathbb R}^4\). Representing lines of \(\Pi_3\) as points of the Klein quadric the authors characterise Clifford parallelisms of \(\text{ PG}(3,{\mathbb R})\) as precisely the totally regular (that is, all spreads in the parallelism are regular) pairwise cosymplectic parallelism of \(\text{ PG}(3,{\mathbb R})\). Moreover, it is shown that each Clifford parallelism of \(\text{ PG}(3,{\mathbb R})\) is topological. Based on the Thas-Walker construction of spreads from flocks of quadrics the authors show how to obtain parallelsims of \(\Pi_3\) from certain classes of flocks of an elliptic quadric \(Q\) in \(\Pi_3\). In particular, a totally regular parallelism can be constructed in this way from a general line star \({\mathcal A}\) with respect to \(Q\), that is, \({\mathcal A}\) is a set of 2-secants of \(Q\) such that each non-interior point of \(Q\) is incident with exactly one line of \({\mathcal A}\). Furthermore, examples of generalized line stars are provided that lead to topological non-Clifford parallelisms and to non-topological parallelisms of \(\text{ PG}(3,{\mathbb R})\), respectively.