Isometric actions of Heisenberg groups on compact Lorentz manifolds

Abstract

We prove results toward classifying compact Lorentz manifolds on which Heisenberg groups act isometrically. We give a general construction, leading to a new example, of codimension-one actions--those for which the dimension of the Heisenberg group is one less than the dimension of the manifold. The main result is a classification of codimension-one actions, under the assumption they are real-analytic.