Homotopes and conformal deformations of symmetric spaces
Homotopy is an important feature of associative and Jordan
algebraic structures: Such structures always come in families whose
members need not be isomorphic among other, but still share many
important properties.
One may regard homotopy as a special kind of deformation
of a given algebraic structure. In this work, we investigate the
global counterpart of this phenomenon on the geometric level of
the associated symmetric spaces -- on this level,
homotopy gives rise to
conformal deformations of symmetric spaces.
These results are valid in arbitrary dimension and over general
base fields and -rings.
(Updated version 10 Jan 2007)
W. Bertram < bertram@iecn.u-nancy.fr >