Geometry and holonomy of indecomposable cones

Abstract

We study the geometry and holonomy of semi-Riemannian, time-like metric cones that are indecomposable, i.e., which do not admit a local decomposition into a semi-Riemannian product. This includes irreducible cones, for which the holonomy can be classified, as well as non-irreducible cones. The latter admit a parallel distribution of null k-planes, and we study the cases k = 1 in detail. We give structure theorems about the base manifold and in the case when the base manifold is Lorentzian, we derive a description of the cone holonomy. This result is obtained by a computation of certain cocycles of indecomposable subalgebras in so(1, n - 1).