Towards a Classification of pseudo-Riemannian Geometries Admitting Twistor Spinors

Abstract: We show that given a conformal structure whose holonomy representation fixes a totally lightlike subspace of arbitrary dimension, there is always a local metric in the conformal class off a singular set which is Ricci-isotropic and gives rise to a parallel, totally lightlike distribution on the tangent bundle. This naturally applies to parallel spin tractors resp. twistor spinors on conformal spin manifolds and clarifies which twistor spinors are locally equivalent to parallel spinors. Moreover, we study the zero set of a twistor spinor using the curved orbit decomposition for parabolic geometries. We can completely describe its local structure, construct a natural projective structure on it, and show that locally every twistor spinor with zero is equivalent to a parallel spinor off the zero set. An application of these results in low-dimensional split-signatures leads to a complete geometric description of local geometries admitting non-generic twistor spinors in signatures (3,2) and (3,3) which complements the well-known description of the generic case.