We proved in previous work that all real nilpotent Lie algebras of dimension up to [Formula: see text] carrying an ad-invariant metric are nice, i.e. they admit a nice basis in the sense of Lauret et al. In this paper, we show by constructing explicit examples that nonnice irreducible nilpotent Lie algebras admitting an ad-invariant metric exist for every dimension greater than [Formula: see text] and every nilpotency step greater than [Formula: see text]. In the way of doing so, we introduce a method to construct Lie algebras with ad-invariant metrics called the single extension, as a parallel to the well-known double extension procedure.
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