Clifford structures on Riemannian manifolds

We introduce the notion of even Clifford structures on Riemannian manifolds, which for rank r=2 and r=3 reduce to almost Hermitian and quaternion-Hermitian structures respectively. We give the complete classification of manifolds carrying parallel rank r even Clifford structures: Kähler, quaternion-Kähler and Riemannian products of quaternion-Kähler manifolds for r=2,3 and 4 respectively, several classes of 8-dimensional manifolds (for 5⩽r⩽8), families of real, complex and quaternionic Grassmannians (for r=8,6 and 5 respectively), and Rosenfeldʼs elliptic projective planes OP2, (C⊗O)P2, (H⊗O)P2 and (O⊗O)P2, which are symmetric spaces associated to the exceptional simple Lie groups F4, E6, E7 and E8 (for r=9,10,12 and 16 respectively). As an application, we classify all Riemannian manifolds whose metric is bundle-like along the curvature constancy distribution, generalizing well-known results in Sasakian and 3-Sasakian geometry.