Convergence of homogeneous manifolds

Abstract

We study in this paper three natural notions of convergence of homogeneous manifolds, namely infinitesimal, local and pointed, and their relationship with a fourth one, which only takes into account the underlying algebraic structure of the homogeneous manifold and is indeed much more tractable. Along the way, we introduce a subset of the variety of Lie algebras which parameterizes the space of all n-dimensional simply connected homogeneous spaces with q-dimensional isotropy, providing a framework which is very advantageous to approach variational problems for curvature functionals as well as geometric evolution equations on homogeneous manifolds.Comment: 26 pages, final version to appear in J. London Math. So