A Poisson Structure on Compact Symmetric Spaces

We present some basic results on a natural Poisson structure on any compact symmetric space. The symplectic leaves of this structure are related to the orbits of the corresponding real semisimple group on the complex flag manifold.Acknowledgements We thank Sam Evens for many useful discussions. The first author was partially supported by NSF grant DMS-0072520. The second author was partially supported by NSF(USA) grants DMS-0105195 and DMS-0072551 and by the HHY Physical Sciences Fund at the University of Hong Kong.