Hard Lefschetz property for isometric flows (Q6152220)

A famous theorem of Hodge theory says that on the cohomology of Kähler manifolds all Poincaré duality isomorphisms can be realised by multiplications with suitable powers of the symplectic form. This is called the Hard Lefschetz Property (HLP) and it often serves to show that many symplectic manifolds can not be Kähler. (Though there do exist some non-Kähler symplectic manifolds with the HLP.) In a similar vein, there is a notion of K-contact manifold which comes with a Reeb flow and a compatible Riemannian metric, and it is called Sasakian if its metric cone is Kähler with the symplectic form compatible with the contact form. In this case the HLP holds for the cohomology of the Sasakian manifold as well as for the basic cohomology of (the foliation induced by) its Reeb flow, and these (actually equivalent) conditions have been used to prove that some K-contact manifolds are not Sasakian. The paper under review considers isometric flows on odd-dimensional manifolds and says that they satisfy the HLP resp. transverse HLP if multiplication by powers of the Euler class induces isomorphisms of basic cohomology resp. cohomology. The authors show that these conditions are equivalent and call flows with this condition ``Lefschetz flows''. They show that a K-contact manifold satisfies the HLP if and only if its Reeb flow is a Lefschetz flow. They also show that there are more examples beyond Reeb flows of Sasakian manifolds to satisfy this form of transverse HLP. On the other hand they construct examples of K-contact flows for which the transverse HLP does not hold, and also K-contact flows for which the transverse HLP holds but which can not come from a Sasakian structure.