Hypercomplex almost abelian solvmanifolds (Q6040523)

A hypercomplex structure on a smooth manifold \(M\) is a triple \(J_1,J_2,J_3\in\Gamma(\mathrm{End}(TM))\) of complex structures satisfying the quaternionic relations. As with many geometric structures it is instructive to study homogeneous examples and more specifically left-invariant structures on Lie groups. In particular, hypercomplex nil- and solvmanifolds (i.e., quotients of nilpotent, or solvable Lie groups by a cocompact lattice) provide an interesting source of examples on the one hand and a testing ground for various conjectures on the other hand. The paper contributes to the understanding of invariant hypercomplex structures on solvmanifolds by providing a characterization of left-invariant hypercomplex structures on almost abelian Lie groups and associated solvmanifolds and giving a criterion for the existence of a compatible HKT metric. The authors go on to classify the hypercomplex almost abelian Lie groups in dimension \(8\), determine which of them admit lattices and show that in fact any flat compact hyper-Kähler manifold of dimension \(8\) is isometric to such a solvmanifold with an invariant hyper-Kähler structure. A Lie group \(G\) is called almost abelian if its Lie algebra \(g\) contains an abelian ideal of codimension one. One of the key technical ingredients of the paper is the observation that if \(n=\dim g\), then \(g\) is of the form \(\mathbb{R}e_0\ltimes \mathbb{R}^{n-1}\) and the Lie algebra structure is essentially determined by the matrix \(A\in gl(n-1,\mathbb R)\) corresponding to the linear map \(\mathrm{ad}_{e_0}\). The characterization and classification results are then given in terms of the matrix \(A\).