Affine projective Osserman structures

Abstract

By considering the projectivized spectrum of the Jacobi operator, we introduce the concept of projective Osserman manifold in both the affine and in the pseudo-Riemannian settings. If M is an affine projective Osserman manifold, then the deformed Riemannian extension metric on the cotangent bundle is both spacelike and timelike projective Osserman. Since any rank-1-symmetric space is affine projective Osserman, this provides additional information concerning the cotangent bundle of a rank-1 Riemannian symmetric space with the deformed Riemannian extension metric. We construct other examples of affine projective Osserman manifolds where the Ricci tensor is not symmetric and thus the connection in question is not the Levi-Civita connection of any metric. If the dimension is odd, we use methods of algebraic topology to show the Jacobi operator of an affine projective Osserman manifold has only one non-zero eigenvalue and that eigenvalue is real.