Room P4.35, Mathematics Building

Travis Willse, The Australian National University
Groups of type G 2 and exceptional geometric structures in dimensions 5, 6, and 7

Several exceptional geometric structures in dimensions 5, 6, and 7 are related in a striking panorama grounded in the algebra of the octonions and split octonions. Considering strictly nearly Kähler structures in dimension 6 leads to prolonging the Killing-Yano (KY) equation in this dimension, and the solutions of the prolonged system define a holonomy reduction to a group of exceptional type G 2 of a natural rank-7 vector bundle, which can in turn be realized as the tangent bundle of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold, which hence relates this construction to exceptional metric holonomy. In the richer case of indefinite signature, a suitable solution ω of the KY equation can degenerate along a (hence 5-dimensional) hypersurface Σ, in which case it partitions the underlying manifold into a union of three submanifolds and induces an exceptional geometric structure on each. On the two open manifolds (which have common boundary Σ), ω defines asymptotically hyperbolic nearly Kähler and nearly para-Kähler structures. On Σ itself, ω determines a generic 2-plane field, the type of structure whose equivalence problem Cartan investigated in his famous Five Variables paper. The conformal structure this plane field induces via Nurowski's construction is a simultaneous conformal infinity for the nearly (para-)Kähler structures.

This project is a collaboration with Rod Gover and Roberto Panai.