On the real homotopy type of generalized complex nilmanifolds
Adela Latorre, Luis Ugarte, Raquel Villacampa

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that in dimensions greater than or equal to 8, there are infinitely many real homotopy types of nilmanifolds with generalized complex structures of all types, contrasting with the limited 6-dimensional case.
Contribution
It establishes the existence of infinitely many real homotopy types of nilmanifolds with generalized complex structures in higher dimensions, expanding understanding of their diversity.
Findings
Infinite real homotopy types in higher dimensions
Existence of generalized complex structures of all types
Contrast with limited 6-dimensional cases
Abstract
We prove that for any there are infinitely many real homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds admitting generalized complex structures of every type , for . This is in deep contrast to the -dimensional case.
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On the real homotopy type of generalized complex nilmanifolds
Adela Latorre
Departamento de Matemática Aplicada, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, C/ José Antonio Novais 10, 28040 Madrid, Spain
,
Luis Ugarte
Departamento de Matemáticas - I.U.M.A.
Universidad de Zaragoza
Campus Plaza San Francisco
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
and
Raquel Villacampa
Centro Universitario de la Defensa - I.U.M.A., Academia General Militar, Crta. de Huesca s/n. 50090 Zaragoza, Spain
Abstract.
We prove that for any there are infinitely many real homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds admitting generalized complex structures of every type , for . This is in deep contrast to the -dimensional case.
Key words and phrases:
Nilmanifold, nilpotent Lie algebra, complex structure, symplectic form, generalized complex structure, homotopy theory, minimal model.
2000 Mathematics Subject Classification:
Primary 53D18, 55P62; Secondary 17B30, 53C56, 53D05.
1. Introduction
Nilmanifolds constitute a well-known class of compact manifolds providing interesting explicit examples of geometric structures with special properties. A nilmanifold is a compact quotient of a connected and simply connected nilpotent Lie group by a lattice of maximal rank in . Hence, any left-invariant geometric structure on descends to . We will refer to such structures as invariant. For instance, there are nilmanifolds admitting invariant complex structures, as the Iwasawa manifold, or invariant symplectic forms, as the Kodaira-Thurston manifold, with remarkable properties [18, 19]. However, by [10] a nilmanifold cannot admit any Kähler metric (invariant or not), unless it is a torus. Since there are also nilmanifolds with no invariant complex structures or symplectic forms, it is an interesting problem to understand which nilmanifolds do admit such kinds of structures.
Symplectic and complex geometries constitute two special cases in the unified framework given by generalized complex geometry, introduced by Hitchin in [11] and further developed by Gualtieri [9]. In [4], Cavalcanti and Gualtieri study invariant generalized complex structures on nilmanifolds. Furthermore, Angella, Calamai and Kasuya show in [1] that nilmanifolds provide a nice class for investigating cohomological aspects of generalized complex structures.
In [4, Theorem 3.1] the authors prove that any invariant generalized complex structure on a -dimensional nilmanifold must be generalized Calabi-Yau, extending a result of Salamon [16] for invariant complex structures. That means that any generalized complex structure is given by a (left-invariant) trivialization of the canonical bundle, i.e.
[TABLE]
where are real invariant 2-forms and is a globally decomposable complex -form, i.e. , with each invariant. Moreover, these data satisfy the non-degeneracy condition
[TABLE]
as well as the integrability condition
[TABLE]
The integer is called the type of the generalized complex structure. Type corresponds to the usual complex structures, whereas the structures of type are the symplectic ones. It is proved in [4] that all the -dimensional nilmanifolds admit a generalized complex structure of type , for at least one ; however, it is shown that there are nilmanifolds in eight dimensions not admitting any invariant generalized complex structure.
Let be the nilpotent Lie algebra underlying the nilmanifold , and let be the Chevalley-Eilenberg complex seen as a commutative differential graded algebra (CDGA). Hasegawa proved in [10] that this CDGA provides not only the -minimal model of but also its -minimal model. A result by Bazzoni and Muñoz asserts that, in six dimensions, there are infinitely many rational homotopy types of nilmanifolds, but only 34 different real homotopy types (see [3, Theorem 2]). Hence, there only exits a finite number of real homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds admitting a generalized complex structure. In this paper we prove that the situation is completely different in eight dimensions:
Theorem 1.1**.**
There are infinitely many real homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds admitting generalized complex structures of every type , for .
It is worth remarking that the existence of infinitely many real homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds with complex structure (having special Hermitian metrics) is proved in [13]. However, such nilmanifolds do not admit any symplectic form.
This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we review some general results about minimal models and homotopy theory, and we define a family of nilmanifolds in eight dimensions depending on a rational parameter . Section 3 is devoted to the construction of generalized complex structures on the nilmanifolds . More concretely, we prove the following:
Proposition 1.2**.**
For each , the -dimensional nilmanifold has generalized complex structures of every type , for .
In Section 4 we study the real homotopy types of the nilmanifolds in the family . More precisely, the result below is attained:
Proposition 1.3**.**
If , then the nilmanifolds and have non-isomorphic -minimal models, so they have different real homotopy type.
Note that Theorem 1.1 is a direct consequence of Propositions 1.2 and 1.3. Moreover, by taking products with even dimensional tori the result holds in any dimension and for every . Furthermore, our result in Theorem 1.1 can be extended to the complex homotopy setting (see Remark 4.4 for details). Since the nilmanifolds cannot admit any Kähler metric [10], one has the following
Corollary 1.4**.**
Let . There are infinitely many complex homotopy types of -dimensional compact non-Kähler manifolds admitting generalized complex structures of every type , for .
2. The family of nilmanifolds
Let us start recalling some general results about homotopy theory and minimal models, with special attention to the class of nilmanifolds. In [17] Sullivan shows that it is possible to associate a minimal model to any nilpotent CW-complex , i.e. a space whose fundamental group is a nilpotent group that acts in a nilpotent way on the higher homotopy group of for every . Recall that a minimal model is a commutative differential graded algebra, CDGA for short, defined over the rational numbers and satisfying a certain minimality condition, that encodes the rational homotopy type of [8].
More generally, let be the field or . A CDGA defined over is said to be minimal if the following conditions hold:
(i) is the free commutative algebra generated by the graded vector space ;
(ii) there exists a basis , for some well-ordered index set , such that
for , and each is expressed in terms of the preceding .
A -minimal model of a differentiable manifold is a minimal CDGA over together with a quasi-isomorphism from to the -de Rham complex of , i.e. a morphism inducing an isomorphism in cohomology. Here, the -de Rham complex of is the usual de Rham complex of differential forms when , whereas for one considers -polynomial forms instead. Notice that the -minimal model is unique up to isomorphism, since . By [5, 17], two nilpotent manifolds and have the same -homotopy type if and only if their -minimal models are isomorphic. It is clear that if and have different real homotopy type, then and also have different rational homotopy type.
Let be a nilmanifold, i.e. is a compact quotient of a connected and simply connected nilpotent Lie group by a lattice of maximal rank. For any nilmanifold one has , which is nilpotent, and for every . Therefore, nilmanifolds are nilpotent spaces.
Let be the dimension of the nilmanifold , and let be the Lie algebra of . It is well known that the minimal model of is given by the Chevalley-Eilenberg complex of . Recall that by [14] the existence of a lattice of maximal rank in is equivalent to the nilpotent Lie algebra being rational, i.e. there exists a basis for the dual such that the structure constants are rational numbers. Thus, the rational and the nilpotency conditions of the Lie algebra allow to take a basis for satisfying
[TABLE]
with structure constants .
Therefore, is a CDGA satisfying both conditions (i) and (ii) with ordered index set and , where for . That is to say, the CDGA over is minimal, and it is determined by
[TABLE]
with generators of degree satisfying equations of the form (4). Notice that the CDGA over is also minimal, since it is given by
[TABLE]
There is a canonical morphism from the Chevalley-Eilenberg complex to the de Rham complex of the nilmanifold. Nomizu proves in [15] that induces an isomorphism in cohomology, so the -minimal model of the nilmanifold is given by (6). Hasegawa observes in [10] that (5) is the -minimal model of and that, conversely, given a -minimal CDGA of the form (5), there exists a nilmanifold with (5) as its -minimal model.
Deligne, Griffiths, Morgan and Sullivan prove in [5] that the -minimal model, or , of a compact Kähler manifold is formal, i.e. it is quasi-isomorphic to its cohomology. Hasegawa shows in [10] that the minimal model (5) is formal if and only if all the structure constants in (4) vanish, so a symplectic nilmanifold does not admit any Kähler metric unless it is a torus. (See for instance [6, 19] for more results on homotopy theory and applications to symplectic geometry.)
Bazzoni and Muñoz study in [3] the -homotopy types of nilmanifolds of low dimension. They prove that, up to dimension , the number of rational homotopy types of nilmanifolds is finite. However, in six dimensions the following result holds:
Theorem 2.1**.**
[3, Theorem 2]** There are infinitely many rational homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds, but there are only real homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds.
As a direct consequence, there is only a finite number of real homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds admitting an extra geometric structure of any kind. In the case of generalized complex structures (see Section 3 for definition), we will prove that, in contrast to the -dimensional case, there are infinitely many real homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds admitting generalized complex structures of every type , for .
To construct such nilmanifolds, let us take a positive rational number and consider the connected, simply connected, nilpotent Lie group corresponding to the nilpotent Lie algebra defined by
[TABLE]
where , being a basis for , and . It is clear from (7) that the Lie algebra is rational, hence by Mal’cev theorem [14], there exists a lattice of maximal rank in . We denote by the corresponding compact quotient.
Therefore, we have defined a family of nilmanifolds of dimension depending on the rational parameter . We will study the properties of , for , in Sections 3 and 4. Here, we simply provide their Betti numbers.
A direct calculation using Nomizu’s theorem [15] allows to explicitly compute the de Rham cohomology groups of any nilmanifold . In particular, for degrees , the -th de Rham cohomology groups are
[TABLE]
Let denote the -th Betti number of . By duality we have:
[TABLE]
One can finally compute the Betti number taking into account that the Euler-Poincaré characteristic of a nilmanifold always vanishes, namely,
[TABLE]
which implies . In particular, we observe that the Betti numbers of the nilmanifolds do not depend on .
3. Generalized complex structures on the nilmanifolds
Generalized complex geometry, in the sense of Hitchin and Gualtieri [11, 9], establishes a unitary framework for symplectic and complex geometries. Let be a compact differentiable manifold of dimension . Denote by the tangent bundle and by the cotangent bundle, and consider the vector bundle endowed with the natural symmetric pairing
[TABLE]
Recall that the Courant bracket on the space is given by
[TABLE]
where and respectively denote the Lie derivative and the interior product. A generalized complex structure on is an endomorphism satisfying whose -eigenbundle is involutive with respect to the Courant bracket.
There is an action of on given by
[TABLE]
Now, for a generalized complex structure with -eigenbundle , one can define the canonical line bundle as
[TABLE]
Any is a non-degenerate pure form, i.e. it can be written as
[TABLE]
where are real -forms and is a complex decomposable -form, such that
[TABLE]
The number is called the type of the generalized complex structure. Moreover, any is integrable, i.e. there exists satisfying
[TABLE]
Notice that the converse also holds: if is a line bundle such that any is a non-degenerate pure form and any is integrable, then we have a generalized complex structure whose -eigenbundle is .
In the case that is a trivial bundle admitting a nowhere vanishing closed section, the generalized complex structure is called generalized Calabi-Yau.
Recall that if is a complex structure on then
[TABLE]
is a generalized complex structure of type , and if is a symplectic form on then
[TABLE]
is a generalized complex structure of type [math]. Near a regular point (i.e. a point where the type is locally constant) a generalized complex structure is equivalent to a product of a complex and a symplectic structure [9, Theorem 3.6].
In the case of a nilmanifold , Cavalcanti and Gualtieri proved in [4, Theorem 3.1] that any invariant generalized complex structure on must be generalized Calabi-Yau. Hence, it is given by a (left-invariant) trivialization of the canonical bundle of the form (1) satisfying the non-degeneracy condition (2) and the integrability condition (3).
Let us now prove Proposition 1.2, that is, each nilmanifold has generalized complex structures of every type , for . These structures will be explicitly described in terms of the global basis of invariant 1-forms on given in (7). We begin providing a structure of type 4.
Generalized complex structure of type 4 (complex structure). We define the following complex -forms:
[TABLE]
From the equations (7) we get
[TABLE]
Declaring the forms to be of bidegree , we obtain an almost complex structure on the nilmanifold for every . It follows from (9) that has no component, so is integrable. Hence, is a generalized complex structure of type 4.
Remark 3.1**.**
The complex nilmanifold has a holomorphic Poisson structure given by the holomorphic bivector of rank two, where is the dual basis of (see [4, Theorem 5.1] for the existence of such a bivector on nilmanifolds). It is worth observing that does not admit any (invariant or not) holomorphic symplectic structure: since the center of the Lie algebra has dimension 1, the complex structure defined by (8) is strongly non-nilpotent (see [12] for properties on this kind of complex structures); by [2], a strongly non-nilpotent complex structure on an -dimensional nilmanifold cannot support any holomorphic symplectic form. **
Generalized complex structure of type 3. Let us consider , with , and , where and are the complex 1-forms given in (8). It is clear that
[TABLE]
so the non-degeneracy condition (2) is satisfied. A direct calculation using (9) shows
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
which implies that , i.e. the integrability condition (3) holds.
Therefore, the nilmanifolds have generalized complex structures of type 3.
Generalized complex structure of type 2. Recall that the action of a bivector is given by . If is a complex structure and is a holomorphic Poisson structure of rank , then one can deform into a generalized complex structure of type (see [9]). In [4, Theorem 5.1] it is proved that every invariant complex structure on a -dimensional nilmanifold can be deformed, via such a -field with , to get an invariant generalized complex structure of type . Therefore, our nilmanifolds have a generalized complex structure of type 2.
More concretely, in view of Remark 3.1, from the generalized complex structure of type 4 defined by above, we get that
[TABLE]
with , is a generalized complex structure of type 2. Indeed, and . Thus,
[TABLE]
and and by the equations (9).
For the definition of generalized complex structures of type 1 and type 0 we will deal with the space of invariant closed -forms on the nilmanifold . The following lemma is straightforward:
Lemma 3.2**.**
Every invariant closed -form on the nilmanifold is given by
[TABLE]
where . Hence, the space has dimension .
Generalized complex structure of type 1. We must find , with real invariant 2-forms and a complex -form, satisfying
[TABLE]
Since is a complex -form, it can be written as , for some complex coefficients . Let us choose , which fulfills according to the structure equations (7).
We consider and let be any -form given in (10) with coefficients . A direct calculation shows that
[TABLE]
Since both and are closed, the condition is trivially fulfilled, and defines a generalized complex structure of type on the nilmanifold .
Generalized complex structure of type 0 (symplectic structure). The form in Lemma 3.2 determined by (10) satisfies
[TABLE]
It suffices to choose, for instance, and to get a symplectic form on .
This concludes the proof of Proposition 1.2.
4. The nilmanifolds and their minimal model
The goal of this section is to prove Proposition 1.3, i.e. the nilmanifolds and have non-isomorphic -minimal models for .
As we recalled in Section 2, the -minimal model of the nilmanifold is given by the Chevalley-Eilenberg complex of its underlying Lie algebra . Consequently, to prove Proposition 1.3 it suffices to show that the real Lie algebras , , define a family of pairwise non-isomorphic nilpotent Lie algebras. Indeed, we will prove the following
Proposition 4.1**.**
If the nilpotent Lie algebras and are isomorphic, then .
Remember that in eight dimensions, no classification of nilpotent Lie algebras is available. Indeed, nilpotent Lie algebras are classified only up to real dimension 7. More concretely, Gong classified in [7] the 7-dimensional nilpotent Lie algebras in 140 algebras together with 9 one-parameter families. One can check that our family is not an extension of any of those 9 families, i.e. the quotient of by its center (which has dimension ) does not belong to any of the 9 one-parameter families of Gong. Furthermore, the usual invariants for nilpotent Lie algebras are the same for all the algebras in the family . For instance, the dimensions of the terms in the ascending central series are , whereas those of the descending central series are (see Lemma 4.3 for further details). Moreover, the dimensions of the Lie algebra cohomology groups coincide for every , as shown at the end of Section 2. For this reason, we will directly analyze the existence of an isomorphism between any two of the nilpotent Lie algebras in our family .
The following technical lemma will be useful for our purpose.
Lemma 4.2**.**
Let be an isomorphism of the Lie algebras and . Consider an ideal , and let be the corresponding ideal in . Let , resp. , be a basis of , resp. , and complete it up to a basis of , resp. of . Denote the dual bases of and respectively by and . Then, the dual map satisfies
[TABLE]
Proof.
Let and be the natural projections, and the Lie algebra isomorphism induced by on the quotients. Taking the corresponding dual maps, we have the following commutative diagrams:
[TABLE]
Taking the basis of , we have that is a basis of . Let be its dual basis for . Using a similar procedure, we find a basis for . Since the maps and are injective, and the diagram is commutative, we get
[TABLE]
for any . ∎
Applying the previous result to our particular case, we get:
Lemma 4.3**.**
Consider and for . If is an isomorphism of Lie algebras, then in terms of their respective bases and given in (7), the dual map satisfies
[TABLE]
Proof.
Recall that the ascending central series of a Lie algebra is defined by , where and
[TABLE]
Observe that is the center of .
Let and be the bases for and dual to and , respectively. In terms of these bases, the ascending central series of and are
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
Since f\big{(}({\mathfrak{g}}_{\alpha})_{k}\big{)}=({\mathfrak{g}}_{\alpha^{\prime}})_{k} for any Lie algebra isomorphism , applying Lemma 4.2 to the ideals for one gets (12) for and .
Moreover, the derived algebras of and are, respectively,
[TABLE]
Using again Lemma 4.2 with , we obtain (12) for . ∎
We are now in the conditions to prove Proposition 4.1.
Proof of Proposition 4.1. Given any homomorphism of Lie algebras , its dual map naturally extends to a map that commutes with the differentials, i.e. . Hence, in terms of the bases for and for satisfying the equations (7) with respective parameters and , any Lie algebra isomorphism is defined by
[TABLE]
satisfying conditions
[TABLE]
where the matrix belongs to .
We first note that the preceding lemma allows us to simplify the matrix . In fact, from Lemma 4.3 one has that for and , for and , and also . Since belongs to , the previous conditions imply that and .
Note also that (14) is trivially fulfilled for . Hence, it suffices to focus on . We will denote by \big{[}d\big{(}F(e^{\prime\,i})\big{)}-F(de^{\prime\,i})\big{]}_{jr} the coefficient for in the expression of the 2-form d\big{(}F(e^{\prime\,i})\big{)}-F(de^{\prime\,i}).
By a direct calculation we have
[TABLE]
Since , we conclude that . Now observe that the following expressions must annihilate:
[TABLE]
Solving and from the first two equations and replacing their values in the last ones, we get:
[TABLE]
Moreover, also the following terms must vanish:
[TABLE]
From the second one, we have . Since , in particular also . Using the first expression above, we can then solve
[TABLE]
In addition, observe that \big{[}d\big{(}F(e^{\prime\,5})\big{)}-F(de^{5})\big{]}_{12}=\big{[}d\big{(}F(e^{\prime\,7})\big{)}-F(de^{7})\big{]}_{13}=0 lead to
[TABLE]
We now check that the vanishing of the coefficient leads to a contradiction. Indeed, in such case, the first expression in (17) becomes , and from (15) we then have , which plugged into (16) gives . Replacing this value in the second equation of (17), the condition arises. Since and are greater than zero, we are forced to consider . However, this leads to , which is a contradiction. Hence, we necessarily have that is nonzero.
Since , the condition
[TABLE]
implies . Replacing this value in (15), (16), and (17), we obtain:
[TABLE]
As , one immediately has and . Consequently , which allows us to conclude , and thus . This completes the proof of the proposition.
Remark 4.4**.**
In addition to the notions of rational and real homotopy types, there is also the notion of complex homotopy type [5]. Two manifolds and have the same -homotopy type if and only if their -minimal models and are isomorphic. Here and are the rational minimal models of and , respectively. Recall that when the field has , the -minimal model is unique up to isomorphism. Clearly, if and have different complex homotopy type, then and have different real (hence, also rational) homotopy type.
For nilmanifolds, it is proved in [3, Theorem 2] that there are exactly complex homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds. It is worth remarking that if , then our nilmanifolds and have different -minimal model. Indeed, it can be checked that the proof of Proposition 1.3 above directly extends to the case when the matrix defined in (13) belongs to . In conclusion, our main result in Theorem 1.1 extends to the complex case, i.e. there are infinitely many complex homotopy types of -dimensional nilmanifolds admitting a generalized complex structure of every type , for . Now, Corollary 1.4 is a consequence of the fact that the product nilmanifolds do not admit any Kähler metric. **
Acknowledgments. This work has been partially supported by the projects MTM2017-85649-P (AEI/FEDER, UE), and E22-17R “Álgebra y Geometría” (Gobierno de Aragón/FEDER).
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
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