Geometric structures invariant to symmetries

Abstract

We introduce and discuss (local) symmetries of geometric structures. These symmetries generalize the classical (locally) symmetric spaces to various other geometries. Our main tools are homogeneous Cartan geometries and their explicit description. This allows us to describe the structure of symmetric geometric structures and to provide a general construction of such structures. Since we can view the classical (locally) symmetric spaces as special case, this allows us to classify various geometric structures on semisimple symmetric spaces. Then we investigate the case of symmetric parabolic geometries in detail and obtain classification of symmetric AHS-structures and symmetric parabolic contact geometries in the semisimple cases.