On the cohomology of a class of nilpotent Lie algebras

Abstract

Let g denote a finite dimensional nilpotent Lie algebra over ℂ containing an Abelian ideal a of codimension 1, with z ∈ g/a. We give a combinatorial description of the Betti numbers of g in terms of the Jordan decomposition induced by ad(z)|a. As an application we prove that the filiform-nilpotent Lie algebras arising in the case t = 1 have unimodal Betti numbers.