Quaternionic-like manifolds and homogeneous twistor spaces

Motivated by the quaternionic geometry corresponding to the homogeneous complex manifolds endowed with (holomorphically) embedded spheres, we introduce and initiate the study of the ‘quaternionic-like manifolds’. These contain, as particular subclasses, the CR quaternionic and the ρ -quaternionic manifolds. Moreover, the notion of ‘heaven space’ finds its adequate level of generality in this setting: (essentially) any real analytic quaternionic-like manifold admits a (germ) unique heaven space, which is a ρ -quaternionic manifold. We, also, give a natural construction of homogeneous complex manifolds endowed with embedded spheres, thus, emphasizing the abundance of the quaternionic-like manifolds.