Rotational spreads and rotational parallelisms and oriented parallelisms of PG(3,R)

Abstract

We introduce topological parallelisms of oriented lines (briefly called oriented parallelisms). Every topological parallelism (of lines) on PG(3,R) gives rise to a parallelism of oriented lines, but we show that even the most homogeneous parallelisms of oriented lines other than the Clifford parallelism do not necessarily arise in this way. In fact we determine all parallelisms of both types that admit a reducible SO(3)-action. Only the Clifford parallelism admits a larger group Surprisingly, it turns out that there are far more oriented parallelisms of this kind than ordinary parallelisms. In particular, we show that the SO(3)-invariant ordinary parallelisms constructed by Betten and Riesinger are the only ones compatible with this group action. We also study the rotational Betten spreads used in this construction and their automorphisms. The automorphism group of the (oriented) parallelisms is always SO(3), no matter how large the automorphism group of the non-regular spread is. There are far more isomorphism types of parallelisms than types of spreads.