Transitive nilpotent Lie algebras of vector fields and their Tanaka prolongations

Abstract

Transitive local Lie algebras of vector fields can be easily constructed from dilations of $\mathbb{R}^n$ associating with coordinates positive weights (give me a sequence of $n$ positive integers and I will give you a transitive nilpotent Lie algebra of vector fields on $\mathbb{R}^n$). It is interesting that all transitive nilpotent local Lie algebra of vector fields can be obtained as subalgebras of nilpotent algebras of this kind. Starting with a graded nilpotent Lie algebra one constructs graded parts of its Tanaka prolongations inductively as `derivations of degree 0, 1, etc. Of course, vector fields of weight $k$ with respect to the dilation define automatically derivations of weight $k$, so the Tanaka prolongation is in this case never finite. Are they all such derivations given by vector fields or there are additional `strange'ones? We answer this question. Except for special cases, derivations of degree 0 are given by vector fields of degree 0 and the Tanaka prolongation recovers the whole algebra of polynomial vectors defined by the dilation. However, in some particular cases of dilations we can find `strange' derivations which we describe in detail