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We show that 3-Sasaki structures admit a natural description in terms of projective differential geometry. First we establish that a 3-Sasaki structure may be understood as a projective structure whose tractor connection admits a holonomy reduction, satisfying a particular non-vanishing condition, to the (possibly indefinite) unitary quaternionic group Sp (p , q) . Moreover, we show that, if a holonomy reduction to Sp (p , q) of the tractor connection of a projective structure does not satisfy this condition, then it decomposes the underlying manifold into a disjoint union of strata including open manifolds with (indefinite) 3-Sasaki structures and a closed separating hypersurface at infinity with respect to the 3-Sasaki metrics. It is shown that the latter hypersurface inherits a Biquard–Fefferman conformal structure, which thus (locally) fibers over a quaternionic contact structure, and which in turn compactifies the natural quaternionic Kähler quotients of the 3-Sasaki structures on the open manifolds. As an application, we describe the projective compactification of (suitably) complete, non-compact (indefinite) 3-Sasaki manifolds and recover Biquard's notion of asymptotically hyperbolic quaternionic Kähler metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cone structure on a complex manifold M is a closed submanifold C ⊂ P T M of the projectivized tangent bundle which is submersive over M. A conic connection on C specifies a distinguished family of curves on M in the directions specified by C . There are two common sources of cone structures and conic connections, one in differential geometry and another in algebraic geometry. In differential geometry, we have cone structures induced by the geometric structures underlying holomorphic parabolic geometries, a classical example of which is the null cone bundle of a holomorphic conformal structure. In algebraic geometry, we have the cone structures consisting of varieties of minimal rational tangents (VMRT) given by minimal rational curves on uniruled projective manifolds. The local invariants of the cone structures in parabolic geometries are given by the curvature of the parabolic geometries, the nature of which depend on the type of the parabolic geometry, i.e., the type of the fibers of C → M . For the VMRT-structures, more intrinsic invariants of the conic connections which do not depend on the type of the fiber play important roles. We study the relation between these two different aspects for the cone structures induced by parabolic geometries associated with a long simple root of a complex simple Lie algebra. As an application, we obtain a local differential-geometric version of the global algebraic-geometric recognition theorem due to Mok and Hong–Hwang. In our local version, the role of rational curves is completely replaced by appropriate torsion conditions on the conic connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that for any complete connected Kähler manifold, the index of the group of complex affine transformations in the group of c-projective transformations is at most two unless the Kähler manifold is isometric to complex projective space equipped with a positive constant multiple of the Fubini-Study metric. This establishes a stronger version of the recently proved Yano-Obata conjecture for complete Kähler manifolds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]