Prof. Simon Salamon, King’s College London – Geometric Methods in Representation Theory Seminar

Title: Wolf spaces and Fano contact manifolds

Abstract: The correspondence between Riemannian symmetric spaces with holonomy a subgroup of Sp(n)Sp(1) and complex homogeneous spaces with a holomorphic contact structure was discovered by Joseph Wolf in 1965, yet the possibility of non-homogeneous manifolds with positive curvature subscribing to this model remains open. I shall explain what is known about positive quaternion-Kaehler manifolds and their Fano twistor spaces, in the light of recent results of Buczynski-Wisniewski-Weber on torus actions on contact Fano manifolds.