A Frobenius theorem for Cartan geometries, with applications (Q648495)

The author proves Gromov's Frobenius theorem in the special case of Cartan connections: jets of automorphisms of high enough order of an analytic Cartan connection arise from global automorphisms. This implies a second result of Gromov, that any dense orbit lies in an open dense set on which the Cartan connection has constant curvature, so is locally homogeneous. The same result is proven for smooth Cartan connections of algebraic type. (It is very important to have these clear and direct proofs of Gromov's results in the category of Cartan connections, because it is very complicated and indirect to relate Gromov's theory to Cartan's.) Moreover, the author proves, among many other new results, that on a compact, simply connected manifold, any unimodular analytic Cartan connection of algebraic type with dense automorphism group orbit is homogeneous. The Bader-Frances-Melnick embedding theorem is applied to relate the fundamental group of a compact manifold with analytic Cartan connection to the automorphism group of the Cartan connection.