Affine manifolds with nilpotent holonomy

Abstract

An affine manifold is a differentiable manifold together with an atlas of coordinate charts whose coordinate changes extend to affine automorphisms of Euclidean space. These charts are called atline coordinates. A map between affine manifolds is called affine it its expression in affine coordinates is the restriction of an aftine map between vector spaces. Thus we form the category of affine manifolds and affine m_nps. Let M be a connected affine manifold of dimension n-> 1, locally isomorphic to the vector space E. Its universal covering/~/ inheri ts a unique affine structure for which the covering projection/~/--~ M is an aifine immersion. The group ~r of deck transformations acts on /V/by afline automorphisms. It is well known that there is an affine immersion D :/~5/--~ E, called the developing map. This follows, for example, from Chevalley's Monodromy Theorem; a proof is outlined in Section 2. Such an immersion is unique up to composition with an atiine automorphism of E. Thus for every g ~ n there is a unique affine automorphism a(g) of E such that D o g =ct(g)oD. The resulting homomorphism a : ~r --~ Aft (E) from 7r into the group of affine automorphisms of E is called the affine holonomy representation. It is unique up to inner automorphisms of Aft (E). The composition A : 7r ~ G L (E) is called the linear holonomy representation. The affine structure on M is completely determined by the pair (D, a) . M is called complete when D is a homeomorphism. This is equivalent to geodesic completeness of the connection on M (in which parallel transport is locally defined by affine charts as ordinary parallel transport in E). It is notorious that compactness does not imply completeness. The main results of this paper are about aftine manifolds whose affine holonomy groups a(Tr) are nilpotent. An important class of such manifolds are the affine nilmanifolds 7r\G. Here 7r is a discrete subgroup of a simply connected nilpoint Lie group G. It is assumed that G has a left-invariant afline structure; the space of right cosets of r then inherits an affine structure.