On the irreducibility of locally metric connections (Q278874)

The authors study the reducibility question of locally metric connections. A connection \(\nabla\) on \(TM\to M\), where \(M\) is a Riemannian manifold, is called a locally metric connection if it is torsion free and has compact restricted holonomy group. One can check that an irreducible locally metric connection, meaning that its holonomy representation is irreducible, preserves a conformal structure on \(M\). The authors of the article under review motivates the problem under study by recalling that a locally metric connection preserving a conformal structure is NOT necessarily irreducible. Indeed, the authors point out that all known examples of reducible locally metric connections preserving a conformal structure are either globally metric, or flat, or the manifold \(M\) is non-compact. This makes the authors formulate the conjecture that any locally metric conformal connection on a compact manifold \(M\) which is neither flat nor globally metric, has irreducible holonomy. While this conjecture was still open in the time when the article was published, the authors prove the conjecture under an additional assumption, i.e., the conjecture holds if the connection is tame (see Definition 3.2 for the definition of tameness). In a recent article by \textit{V. S. Matveev} and \textit{Y. Nikolayevsky} [C. R., Math., Acad. Sci. Paris 353, No. 5, 455--457 (2015; Zbl 1316.53038)] the conjecture given by the authors is disproved by constructing a counterexample.