Deformation of Bott-Samelson varieties and variations of isotropy structures

Abstract: In the framework of the problem of characterizing complete flag manifolds by their contractions, the complete flags of type $F_4$ and $G_2$ satisfy the property that any possible tower of Bott-Samelson varieties dominating them birationally deforms in a nontrivial moduli. In this paper we illustrate the fact that, at least in some cases, these deformations can be explained in terms of automorphisms of Schubert varieties, providing variations of certain isotropic structures on them. As a corollary, we provide a unified and completely algebraic proof of the characterization of complete flag manifolds in terms of their contractions.