O tensor de Ricci e campos de killing de espaços simétricos

Abstract

This work brings a smooth and self-contained introduction to the study of the most basic aspects of symmetric spaces, having as its nal goal the characterization of the Killing vector fields and of the Ricci tensor of such riemannian manifolds. Several of the results presented in the initial chapter are not easily found, in the Diferential Geometry literature, in a way as accessible and self-contained as here. This being said, we believe that this work embodies some didactic relevance, for it others students interested in symmetric spaces a relatively smooth first contact. We shall generally look at symmetric spaces as homogeneous manifolds G=H, where G is a Lie group and H is a closed Lie subgroup of G, such that the natural mapping : G ! G=H is a riemannian submersion. Ultimately, this map allows us to describe the relationships between the curvature, the Ricci tensor and the geodesics of G and G=H. For our purposes, the crucial remark is that, under appropriate circumstances, one guarantees the existence, in G=H, of a metric for which left translations are isometries. Hence, a one-parameter family of such isometries gives rise to a Killing vector field, which turn into a Jacobi vector eld when restricted to a geodesic. We present explicit expressions for such Jacobi vector elds, showing that they only depend on the eigenvalues of the linear operator TX : g ! g given by TX = (adX)2, for certain vector elds X 2 g.