Two constructions with parabolic geometries

This is an expanded version of a series of lectures delivered at the 25th Winter School ``Geometry and Physics'' in Srni. After a short introduction to Cartan geometries and parabolic geometries, we give a detailed description of the equivalence between parabolic geometries and underlying geometric structures. The second part of the paper is devoted to constructions which relate parabolic geometries of different type. First we discuss the construction of correspondence spaces and twistor spaces, which is related to nested parabolic subgroups in the same semisimple Lie group. An example related to twistor theory for Grassmannian structures and the geometry of second order ODE's is discussed in detail. In the last part, we discuss analogs of the Fefferman construction, which relate geometries corresponding different semisimple Lie groups

AHS-structures and affine holonomies

We show that a large class of non-metric, non-symplectic affine holonomies can be realized, uniformly and without case by case considerations, by Weyl connections associated to the natural AHS-structures on certain generalized flag manifolds.Comment: AMS-LaTeX, 8 pages, v2: changes in exposition; final version; to appear in Proc. Amer. Math. So

On left invariant CR structures on SU(2)

There is a well known one--parameter family of left invariant CR structures on $SU(2)\cong S^3$. We show how purely algebraic methods can be used to explicitly compute the canonical Cartan connections associated to these structures and their curvatures. We also obtain explicit descriptions of tractor bundles and tractor connections.Comment: 10 page

Curved Casimir Operators and the BGG Machinery

We prove that the Casimir operator acting on sections of a homogeneous vector bundle over a generalized flag manifold naturally extends to an invariant differential operator on arbitrary parabolic geometries. We study some properties of the resulting invariant operators and compute their action on various special types of natural bundles. As a first application, we give a very general construction of splitting operators for parabolic geometries. Then we discuss the curved Casimir operators on differential forms with values in a tractor bundle, which nicely relates to the machinery of BGG sequences. This also gives a nice interpretation of the resolution of a finite dimensional representation by (spaces of smooth vectors in) principal series representations provided by a BGG sequence.Comment: This is a contribution to the Proceedings of the 2007 Midwest Geometry Conference in honor of Thomas P. Branson, published in SIGMA (Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications) at http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA