Revisiting the Classification of Homogeneous 3-Sasakian and Quaternionic Kähler Manifolds

Abstract: We provide a new, self-contained proof of the classification of homogeneous 3-Sasakian manifolds, which was originally obtained by Boyer, Galicki and Mann. In doing so, we construct an explicit one-to-one correspondence between simply connected homogeneous 3-Sasakian manifolds and simple complex Lie algebras via the theory of root systems. We also discuss why the real projective spaces are the only non-simply connected homogeneous 3-Sasakian manifolds and derive the famous classification of homogeneous positive quaternionic K\"ahler manifolds due to Wolf and Alekseevskii from our results.