Derivations and central extensions of symmetric modular Lie algebras and superalgebras (with an appendix by Andrey Krutov) (Q6115278)

The first section contains the background and the motivation for the paper under review. Derivations and central extensions of simple Lie (super)algebras are not only interesting on its own, but both are useful in the classification of finite-dimensional simple Lie (super)algebras over an algebraically closed field of positive characteristic. For example, the non-existence of outer derivations implies the restrictedness of the given Lie (super)algebra, and derivations as well as certain central extensions are needed for the construction of so-called double extensions of Lie (super)algebras admitting a non-degenerate invariant (super)symmetric bilinear form. The authors also summarize their work on the classification of finite-dimensional simple Lie superalgebras and some related work of others. In particular, they formulate a procedure for obtaining all simple Lie algebras: Namely, take the generalized Cartan-Tanaka-Shchepochkina prolong of the non-positive part of a Lie algebra admitting a Cartan matrix, form the first or second derived subalgebra of this prolong, and then deform the latter. This works for characteristics \(p>3\), and the authors conjecture that it should produce also all simple Lie algebras in characteristic 3. Moreover, it is stated that the classification of all simple Lie superalgebras in characteristic 2 can be reduced to the classification of all simple Lie algebras and their \(\mathbb{Z}_2\)-gradings. The first section of the paper closes with several open problems. The main part of the paper is devoted to the computation of the first adjoint cohomology (outer derivations) and the second cohomology with trivial coefficients (central extensions) for finite-dimensional symmetric simple modular Lie (super)algebras of rank \(\le 8\) and for certain closely related Lie (super)algebras in characteristic 2 (namely, (ortho-)orthogonal Lie (super)algebras, Shen's analogue of the Melikian algebra, and queerifications of Weisfeiler-Kac algebras) as well as for periplectic Lie superalgebras (i.e., Lie superalgebras preserving a non-degenerate symmetric odd bilinear form) in characteristic \(p\ge 2\) and their symmetric desuperizations in characteristic 2. (A simple Lie superalgebra is said to be {\em symmetric\/} if every root (with respect to a maximal torus) has the same multiplicity as its opposite root. Note that it is not clear that this definition is independent of the choice of the maximal torus.) As in the accompanying paper [\textit{S. Bouarroudj} et al., SIGMA, Symmetry Integrability Geom. Methods Appl. 19, Paper 031, 66 p. (2023; Zbl 1529.17031)], the computations are done by using the second author's SuperLie package. ln an appendix Krutov lists the derivations and the central extensions for some of the non-trivial deforms of the finite-dimensional symmetric Lie (super)algebras admitting an indecomposable Cartan matrix and the related simple Lie (super)algebras in characteristics 2 and 3 (but only with even deformation parameter). The finite-dimensional modular Lie superalgebras admitting an indecomposable Cartan matrix were classified previously by the first two authors and Leites in [\textit{S. Bouarroudj} et al., SIGMA, Symmetry Integrability Geom. Methods Appl. 5, Paper 060, 63 p. (2009; Zbl 1220.17010)].