Spin(9) and almost complex structures on 16-dimensional manifolds (Q664371)

A \(\operatorname{Spin}(9)\)-structure on a \(16\)-dimensional Riemannian manifold \((M, g)\) is vector subbundle of rank nine of the tangent bundle that is spanned, around each point, by \(9\) anticommuting and self-adjoint involutions [\textit{T. Friedrich}, Asian J. Math. 5, No. 1, 129--160 (2001; Zbl 1021.53028)]. Composing any two of the latter gives a total of 36 \(g\)-orthogonal almost complex structures and hence a \(9\times 9\) skew matrix \(\Psi\) of ``Kähler'' \(2\)-forms. Let \(\Phi\) be the fundamental \(8\)-form of the \(\operatorname{Spin}(9)\)-structure. This is the differential form with isotropy group \(\operatorname{Spin(9)}\subset \text{GL}(16,\mathbb{R})\), i.e., the one corresponding to the trivial module inside \(\Lambda^8\Delta_9\) (\(\Delta_9\) being the spin representation). The authors describe thoroughly the relationship between \(\operatorname{Spin}(9)\)-structures and both quaternionic and \(\text{Spin}(7)\) geometries in dimension \(8\), emphasising many aspects that go beyond formal. With standard software they compute (all 702 terms of) the \(\text{Spin}(9)\)-form explicitly, and prove that \(\Phi\) is essentially the fourth coefficient of the characteristic polynomial of the matrix \(\Psi\). This is eventually applied to determine the Pontrjagin classes of the compact models of manifolds with holonomy \(\text{Spin}(9)\), namely Cayley's projective plane and compact quotients of the hyperbolic octonionic plane [\textit{D. V. Alekseevskij}, Funkts. Anal. Prilozh. 2, No. 2, 1--10 (1968; Zbl 0175.18902)].