Homogeneous Hypercomplex Structures I - the compact Lie groups

Abstract

We introduce a remarkable subset "the stem" of the set of positive roots of a reduced root system. The stem determines several interesting decompositions of the corresponding reductive Lie algebra. It gives also a nice simple three dimensional subalgebra and a "Cayley transform". In the present paper we apply the above devices to give a complete classification of invariant hypercomplex structures on compact Lie groups.