Weyl-parallel forms, conformal products and Einstein-Weyl manifolds

Motivated by the study of Weyl structures on conformal manifolds admitting parallel weightless forms, we define the notion of conformal product of conformal structures and study its basic properties. We obtain a classification of Weyl manifolds carrying parallel forms, and we use it to investigate the holonomy of the adapted Weyl connection on conformal products. As an application we describe a new class of Einstein-Weyl manifolds of dimension 4.Comment: 24 page

On the irreducibility of locally metric connections

A locally metric connection on a smooth manifold $M$ is a torsion-free connection $D$ on $TM$ with compact restricted holonomy group $\mathrm{Hol}_0(D)$. If the holonomy representation of such a connection is irreducible, then $D$ preserves a conformal structure on $M$. Under some natural geometric assumption on the life-time of incomplete geodesics, we prove that conversely, a locally metric connection $D$ preserving a conformal structure on a compact manifold $M$ has irreducible holonomy representation, unless $\mathrm{Hol}_0(D)=0$ or $D$ is the Levi-Civita connection of a Riemannian metric on $M$. This result generalizes Gallot's theorem on the irreducibility of Riemannian cones to a much wider class of connections. As an application, we give the geometric description of compact conformal manifolds carrying a tame closed Weyl connection with non-generic holonomy.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figure

Symmetries of Contact Metric Manifolds

We study the Lie algebra of infinitesimal isometries on compact Sasakian and K--contact manifolds. On a Sasakian manifold which is not a space form or 3--Sasakian, every Killing vector field is an infinitesimal automorphism of the Sasakian structure. For a manifold with K--contact structure, we prove that there exists a Killing vector field of constant length which is not an infinitesimal automorphism of the structure if and only if the manifold is obtained from the Konishi bundle of a compact pseudo--Riemannian quaternion--Kaehler manifold after changing the sign of the metric on a maximal negative distribution. We also prove that non--regular Sasakian manifolds are not homogeneous and construct examples with cohomogeneity one. Using these results we obtain in the last section the classification of all homogeneous Sasakian manifolds.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX2e, some comments and references adde