Related papers: On the Geometry of Chains
Contact projective structures have been profoundly studied by D.J.F. Fox. He associated to a contact projective structure a canonical projective structure on the same manifold. We interpret Fox' construction in terms of the equivalent…
The general theory of parabolic geometries is applied to the study of the normal Cartan connections for all hyperbolic and elliptic 6-dimensional CR-manifolds of codimension two. The geometric meaning of the individual components of the…
Lie contact structures generalize the classical Lie sphere geometry of oriented hyperspheres in the standard sphere. They can be equivalently described as parabolic geometries corresponding to the contact grading of orthogonal real Lie…
Contact path geometries are curved geometric structures on a contact manifold comprising smooth families of paths modeled on the family of all isotropic lines in the projectivization of a symplectic vector space. Locally such a structure is…
G-structures and Cartan geometries are two major approaches to the description of geometric structures (in the sense of differential geometry) on manifolds of some fixed dimension $n$. We show that both descriptions naturally extend to the…
Following the Cartans's original method of equivalence supported by methods of parabolic geometry, we provide a complete solution for the equivalence problem of quaternionic contact structures, that is, the problem of finding a complete…
We classify compact manifolds of dimension three equipped with a path structure and a fixed contact form (which we refer to as a strict path structure) under the hypothesis that their automorphism group is non-compact. We use a Cartan…
With the help of a generalization of the Fermat principle in general relativity, we show that chains in CR geometry are geodesics of a certain Kropina metric constructed from the CR structure. We study the projective equivalence of Kropina…
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…
A cone structure on a complex manifold $M$ is a closed submanifold $\mathcal C \subset \mathbb P TM$ of the projectivized tangent bundle which is submersive over $M$. A conic connection on $\mathcal C$ specifies a distinguished family of…
We study the relations between the projective and the almost conformally symplectic structures on a smooth even dimensional manifold. We describe these relations by a single almost conformally symplectic connection with totally trace--free…
We reduce CR-structures on smooth elliptic and hyperbolic manifolds of CR-codimension 2 to parallelisms thus solving the problem of global equivalence for such manifolds. The parallelism that we construct is defined on a sequence of two…
We interpret the property of having an infinitesimal symmetry as a variational property in certain geometric structures. This is achieved by establishing a one-to-one correspondence between a class of cone structures with an infinitesimal…
Characteristic class relations in Dolbeault cohomology follow from the existence of a holomorphic Cartan geometry (for example, a holomorphic conformal structure or a holomorphic projective connection). These relations can be calculated…
Each sub-Riemannian geometry with bracket generating distribution enjoys a background structure determined by the distribution itself. At the same time, those geometries with constant sub-Riemannian symbols determine a unique Cartan…
We construct infinite families of regular normal Cartan geometries with nonvanishing curvature and essential automorphisms on closed manifolds for many higher rank parabolic model geometries. To do this, we use particular elements of the…
Cartan's method of moving frames is briefly recalled in the context of immersed curves in the homogeneous space of a Lie group $G$. The contact geometry of curves in low dimensional equi-affine geometry is then made explicit. This delivers…
All parabolic geometries, i.e. Cartan geometries with homogeneous model a real generalized flag manifold, admit highly interesting classes of distinguished curves. The geodesics of a projective class of connections on a manifold, conformal…
We introduce and discuss (local) symmetries of geometric structures. These symmetries generalize the classical (locally) symmetric spaces to various other geometries. Our main tools are homogeneous Cartan geometries and their explicit…
For a more general notion of Cartan connection we define characteristic classes, we investigate their relation to usual characteristic classes.