Highly symmetric 2-plane fields on 5-manifolds and 5-dimensional Heisenberg group holonomy

DOI10.1016/J.DIFGEO.2013.10.010zbMATH Open1293.53040arXiv1302.7163OpenAlexW3100158488WikidataQ115356454 ScholiaQ115356454MaRDI QIDQ2636736FDOQ2636736

Authors: Travis Willse 

Publication date: 31 January 2014

Published in: Differential Geometry and its Applications (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Nurowski showed that any generic 2-plane field $D$ on a 5-manifold $M$ determines a natural conformal structure $c_D$ on $M$; these conformal structures are exactly those (on oriented $M$) whose normal conformal holonomy is contained in the (split, real) simple Lie group $G_2$. Graham and Willse showed that for real-analytic $D$ the same holds for the holonomy of the real-analytic Fefferman-Graham ambient metric of $c_D$, and that both holonomy groups are equal to $G_2$ for almost all $D$. We investigate here independently interesting plane fields for which the associated holonomy groups are a proper subset of $G_2$. Cartan solved the local equivalence problem for $2$-plane fields $D$ and constructed the fundamental curvature tensor $A$ for these objects. He furthermore claimed to describe locally all $D$ whose infinitesimal symmetry algebra has rank at least $6$ and gave a local quasi-normal form, depending on a single function of one variable, for those that furthermore satisfy a natural degeneracy condition on $A$, but Doubrov and Govorov recently rediscovered a counterexample to Cartan's claim. We show that for all $D$ given by Cartan's alleged quasi-normal form, the conformal structures $c_D$ induced via Nurowski's construction are almost Einstein, that we can write their ambient metrics explicitly, and that the holonomy groups associated to $c_D$ are always the $5$-dimensional Heisenberg group, which here acts indecomposably but not irreducibly. (Not all of these properties hold, however, for Doubrov and Govorov's counterexample.) We also show that the similar results hold for the related class of $2$-plane fields defined on suitable jet spaces by ordinary differential equations $z^{\prime }(x)=F(y^{″}(x))$ satisfying a simple genericity condition.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.7163

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zbMATH Keywords

conformal geometryspecial holonomyFefferman-Graham ambient metricgeneric distributions

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

General geometric structures on manifolds (almost complex, almost product structures, etc.) (53C15) Issues of holonomy in differential geometry (53C29) Vector distributions (subbundles of the tangent bundles) (58A30) Hyper-Kähler and quaternionic Kähler geometry, ``special geometry (53C26) Other connections (53B15)

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Cited In (13)

• Flat \((2,3,5)\)-distributions and Chazy's equations
• Maximal holonomy of almost Bieberbach groups for \(\text{Heis}_5\)
• Local equivalence of some maximally symmetric rolling distributions and \(SU(2)\) Pfaffian systems
• Cartan's incomplete classification and an explicit ambient metric of holonomy \(\mathrm G_2^\ast\)
• Parallel tractor extension and ambient metrics of holonomy split \(G_2\)
• On Nurowski's conformal structure associated to a generic rank two distribution in dimension five
• Local type I metrics with holonomy in \(\mathrm{G}_2^\ast\)
• A Monge normal form for the rolling distribution
• New relations between \(\mathrm G_2\) geometries in dimensions 5 and 7
• Spinning switches on a wreath product
• Holonomy groups of \(\mathrm{G}_2^\ast\)-manifolds
• The geometry of almost Einstein \((2,3,5)\) distributions
• Homogeneous real \((2,3,5)\) distributions with isotropy

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