Clifford structures on Riemannian manifolds (Q639541)

A more general notion of ``Clifford structure'' is introduced. The authors call it even Clifford structure. Namely, a rank-\(r\) even Clifford structure (\(r\geq 2\)) on a Riemannian manifold \((M^{n},g)\) is an oriented rank-\(r\) Euclidean bundle \((E,h)\) over \(M\) together with an algebra bundle morphism, called Clifford morphism, \(\varphi:\text{Cl}^{0}(E,h)\longrightarrow \text{End}(TM)\) which maps \(\Lambda^{2}E\) into the bundle of skew-symmetric endomorphisms \(\text{End}^{-}(TM)\). This definition generalizes other notions known in the literature as ``Clifford structures'', like the flat Clifford structure (according to the authors' terminology), i.e., a family of global almost complex structures satisfying the Clifford relations, or ``Clifford-Kähler structures'' [\textit{I. Burdujan}, ``Clifford-Kähler manifolds'', Balkan J. Geom. Appl. 13, No.~2, 12--23 (2008; Zbl 1165.53049)]. The authors provide a classification of manifolds carrying parallel even Clifford structures. In the cases of rank \(r=2\) and \(r=3\), this reduces to Kähler and quaternion-Kähler structures, respectively. For higher values of the rank, the authors obtain Riemannian products of quaternion-Kähler manifolds (\(r=4\)), several classes of \(8\)-dimensional manifolds (\(5\leq r \leq 8\)), like families of real, complex and quaternionic Grassmannians, and Rosenfeld's elliptic projective planes \(\mathbb{OP}^2\), \((\mathbb{C}\otimes\mathbb{O})\mathbb{P}^2\), \((\mathbb{H}\otimes\mathbb{O})\mathbb{P}^2\) and \((\mathbb{O}\otimes\mathbb{O})\mathbb{P}^2\) (for \(r=9\), \(10\), \(12\) and \(16\), respectively). Moreover, the authors give a geometric application of their classification theorem to the theory of manifolds with curvature constancy, a notion introduced by \textit{A. Gray} in [``Spaces of constancy of curvature operators'', Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 17, 897--902 (1966; Zbl 0145.18603)], which includes as remarkable examples Sasakian and \(3\)-Sasakian manifolds.