Nice bases for Lie algebras

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Deré, Jonas, Gantois, Jeroen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918393876054016
author Deré, Jonas
Gantois, Jeroen
author_facet Deré, Jonas
Gantois, Jeroen
contents The concept of a nice basis for a Lie algebra was introduced to study the Ricci curvature on nilpotent Lie groups equipped with a left-invariant metric. Despite the many applications in differential geometry, for example in the construction of Einstein manifolds, very little is known about the existence and number of nice bases on a given Lie algebra. This paper studies this question for three classes of Lie algebras, namely direct sums, almost abelian ones and nilpotent Lie algebras associated to a graph. As an application we compute the number of nice bases for Lie algebras up to dimension $3$, and show that for a general Lie algebra the existence depends on the field over which it is defined. Moreover, for every natural number $n$ we give an indecomposable Lie algebra such that there exists exactly $n$ nice bases up to equivalence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16540
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Nice bases for Lie algebras
Deré, Jonas
Gantois, Jeroen
Differential Geometry
The concept of a nice basis for a Lie algebra was introduced to study the Ricci curvature on nilpotent Lie groups equipped with a left-invariant metric. Despite the many applications in differential geometry, for example in the construction of Einstein manifolds, very little is known about the existence and number of nice bases on a given Lie algebra. This paper studies this question for three classes of Lie algebras, namely direct sums, almost abelian ones and nilpotent Lie algebras associated to a graph. As an application we compute the number of nice bases for Lie algebras up to dimension $3$, and show that for a general Lie algebra the existence depends on the field over which it is defined. Moreover, for every natural number $n$ we give an indecomposable Lie algebra such that there exists exactly $n$ nice bases up to equivalence.
title Nice bases for Lie algebras
topic Differential Geometry
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16540