Nice bases for Lie algebras

Abstract

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.