Twistor spaces of Riemannian manifolds with even Clifford structures (Q507121)

In this paper, the authors introduce twistor spaces for Riemannian manifolds carrying a so-called even Clifford structure and check under what conditions the natural almost complex structure on this twistor space is integrable or can the twistor space accommodate some special metric. This twistor space construction is a common generalization of that for quaternion-Hermitian manifolds and for \(16\)-dimensional Riemannian manifolds possessing a weak \(\mathrm{Spin}(9)\)-structure. More precisely, a \textit{rank-\(r\) even Clifford structure} on a Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) is a pair \((E,\varphi )\) where \(E\) is an oriented rank-\(r\) Euclidean vector bundle over \(M\) and \(\varphi :\mathrm{Cl}^0(E)\rightarrow\mathrm{End}(TM)\) is a non-vanishing bundle morphism between bundles of algebras such that \(\wedge^2E\subset\mathrm{Cl}^0(E)\) is mapped into the subbundle of skew-symmetric endomorphisms of \(TM\) (cf. Definition 2.1). A Riemannian manifold carrying an even Clifford structure admits a twistor space: a certain subbundle \(Z\) of \(\mathrm{End}(TM)\), and this twistor space can be equipped with a natural almost complex structure (Section 3). The main results of the paper give conditions for this almost complex structure on \(Z\) to be integrable (Theorem 3.3), or under what conditions can \(Z\) admit various Kähler-like metrics (Theorem 3.4, Corollary 3.6). The paper also contains the list of low-rank even Clifford structures satisfying some extra technical conditions (Tables 1 and 2) and the list of their twistor spaces (Tables 3 and 4).