Rigidityofrationalhomogeneousspaces-CiteSeer.PDFVIP

Rigidity of rational homogeneous spaces Jun-Muk Hwang Abstract. Rigidity questions on rational homogeneous spaces arise naturally as higher dimen- sional generalizations of Riemann’s uniformization theorem in one complex variable. We will give an overview of some results obtained in this area by the study of minimal rational curves and geometric structures defined by the their tangent directions. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000). Primary 14J45; Secondary 32M10, 32G05. Keywords. Uniformization, rational homogeneous space, minimal rational curves. 1. Introduction Riemann’s uniformization theorem in one complex variable says that the three basic Riemann surfaces, namely, the Riemann sphere P , the complex plane C and the 1 unit disc , exhaust all simply connected Riemann surfaces. Finding an analog of this result in higher dimensions has been one of the main themes of research in complex geometry. A number of approaches from different view-points have been developed for this. Our approach here is to regard Riemann’s uniformization theorem as a characterization of the three basic Riemann surfaces. From this approach, the uniformization problem in several complex variables is to find suitable conditions which characterize some basic classes of complex manifolds generalizing the three basic Riemann surfaces. The most natural higher-dimensional analogs of the three basic Riemann surfaces are Hermitian symmetric spaces. Thus the uniformization problem in several complex variables leads to the study of rigidity of Hermitian symmetric spaces. A nice survey of results on the rigidity of Hermitian symmetric spaces obtained up to early 1990s was given in Siu’s article ‘Uniformization in Several ComplexVariables’ [28]. As one can see in [28], the methods employed are quite different depending o