Classification of flat Lorentzian nilpotent Lie algebras

Abstract

AbstractWe give a complete classification of flat Lorentzian nilpotent Lie algebras, this is to say of pseudo‐Euclidean Lie algebras associated to nilpotent Lie groups endowed with a left‐invariant Lorentzian metric of vanishing curvature. We prove that every such a Lie algebra is a direct sum of an indecomposable flat Lorentzian Lie algebra and an abelian Euclidean summand and show that, if denotes the ‐dimensional Heisenberg Lie algebra, then the only non‐abelian Lie algebras admitting flat Lorentzian metrics which are indecomposable are and the semidirect products and , defined by some particular derivations . In all those cases we also find the equivalence classes of flat Lorentzian products.