Pluripotential theory on quaternionic manifolds

On any quaternionic manifold of dimension greater than 4 a class of plurisubharmonic functions (or, rather, sections of an appropriate line bundle) is introduced. Then a Monge-Ampere operator is defined. It is shown that it satisfies a version of the theorems of A. D. Alexandrov and Chern-Levine-Nirenberg. For more special classes of manifolds analogous results were previously obtained in Alesker (2003) [1] for the flat quaternionic space H-n and in Alesker and Verbitsky (2006) [5] for hypercomplex manifolds. One of the new technical aspects of the present paper is the systematic use of the Baston differential operators, for which we also prove a new multiplicativity property. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.