Irreducible Lie algebra extensions of the Poincaré algebra

We analyse the extensions of the Poincaré algebraP with arbitrary kernels. The main tool is a reduction theorem which generalizes the Hochschild-Serre theorem forn=2. This reduction theorem is proved and used to investigate the structure of the Lie algebras obtained by extension.We look particularly for the irreducible and -irreducible extensions ofP and we classify the types of irreducible extensions with arbitrary kernels.