On homogeneous connections with exotic holonomy

In Proc. Symp. Pure Math. 53 (1991), 33–88, Bryant gave examples of torsion free connections on four-manifolds whose holonomy is exotic, i.e. is not contained on Berger's classical list of irreducible holonomy representations. The holonomy in Bryant's examples is the irreducible four-dimensional representation of S1(2, #x211D;) (G1(2, #x211D;) resp.) and these connections are called H ₃-connections (G ₃-connections resp.).In this paper, we give a complete classification of homogeneous G ₃-connections. The moduli space of these connections is four-dimensional, and the generic homogeneous G ₃-connection is shown to be locally equivalent to a left-invariant connection on U(2). Thus, we prove the existence of compact manifolds with G ₃-connections. This contrasts a result in by Schwachhöfer (Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 345 (1994), 293–321) which states that there are no compact manifolds with an H ₃-connection.