Deformation theory of nearly Kähler manifolds

Abstract

Nearly Kähler manifolds are the Riemannian 6-manifolds admitting real Killing spinors. Equivalently, the Riemannian cone over a nearly Kähler manifold has holonomy contained in G 2 . In this paper we study the deformation theory of nearly Kähler manifolds, showing that it is obstructed in general. More precisely, we show that the infinitesimal deformations of the homogeneous nearly Kähler structure on the flag manifold are all obstructed to second order.