Quaternionic structures on a manifold and subordinated structures (Q678139)

The authors study the geometric properties of the quaternionic-like structures on a smooth manifold \(M^{4n}\), that is \(G\)-structures having as the structural group \(G\) one of the following Lie groups: \(GL_n({\mathbb{H}}),\) \(Sp_1.GL_n({\mathbb{H}}), Sp_1.SL_n({\mathbb{H}}), SL_n({\mathbb{H}}), Sp_1.Sp_n, Sp_n\). The structures with \(G\) one of the groups from the positions 2, 3, 5 are called quaternionic and in the case of these structures it is defined on \(M^{4n}\) an associated vector subbundle \(Q\) of rank 3 in the bundle of tensors of type \((1,1)\). Of course, there are considered the decomplexifications of the considered groups as subgroups in \(GL_{4n}({\mathbb{R}})\) and the corresponding structures are studied by using the general methods of the theory of \(G\)-structures. Let \({\mathcal G}\) be the Lie algebra of the Lie group \(G\) and denote \(V={\mathbb{R}}^{4n}\). The authors describe a complementary \(G\)-module of \(\partial ({\mathcal G}\otimes V^*)\) in the space \(V\otimes \bigwedge ^2V^*\) by obtaining a decomposition of \(V\otimes \bigwedge ^2V^*\) into irreducible invariant subspaces with respect to the induced action of \(G\). Then some relations between \({\mathcal G}\)-connections of quaternionic-like structures and the obtained decomposition are studied. A similar study is made for the space of curvature tensors of the torsion free \({\mathcal G}\)-connections for quaternion-like structures. In the last chapter the authors study in a systematic way a quaternionic structure and the family of quaternionic connections (i.e., the torsion free connections preserving by parallelism the vector bundle \(Q\)), associated to the considered quaternionic structure and establish the relation with the \(Q\)-planar curves. Then they describe some characterizations of the quaternionic connections by means of the Ricci tensor field. For a quaternionic Kähler manifold \((M^{4n},Q,g)\) they study the problem of the existence of a global almost complex structure on \(M^{4n}\) thought of as a section in the vector bundle \(Q\).