Complex contact manifolds and hyperkähler geometry (Q1577703)

An almost quaternionic structure on a real manifold \(M\) is a metric \(g\) together with a three-dimensional bundle \(E\) of endomorphisms of TM with local bases \(\{A,B,C=AB\}\) of local anti-commuting almost complex structures such that \(g\) is Hermitian with respect to each endomorphism. \((M,g,E)\) is Kähler if \(\nabla E\subset T^*M\otimes E\). Under these circumstances, \(g\) is Einstein, and so we can categorize these manifolds into three categories by the sign of the scalar curvature: zero, positive or negative. The paper studies the case of zero scalar curvature. In this case \(E\) is trivial and we get a global set of parallel complex structures \(\{A,B,C\}\). Such an element quaternionic manifold is called hyper-Kähler. In this paper, it is shown that this class of quaternionic manifolds does correspond with a certain class of complex contact manifolds, more precisely with so-called ``strict normal complex contact manifolds''.