The existence of soliton metrics for nilpotent Lie groups

We show that a left-invariant metric g on a nilpotent Lie group N is a soliton metric if and only if a matrix U and vector v associated the manifold (N, g) satisfy the matrix equation U v = [1], where [1] is a vector with every entry a one. We associate a generalized Cartan matrix to the matrix U and use the theory of Kac–Moody algebras to analyze the solution spaces for such linear systems. An application to the existence of soliton metrics on certain filiform Lie groups is given.