Verbal ideals and unobstructed complex parallelisable nilmanifolds

Abstract We show that a compact complex parallelisable nilmanifold has unobstructed deformations if and only if its associated Lie algebra satisfies a reality condition and is a free Lie algebra in a variety of Lie algebras, that is, defined by a verbal ideal in a free Lie algebra. We provide a partial classification of verbal ideals and show that there are finitely many such Lie algebras up to dimension 19, whereas infinite families start to appear in dimension 20. As a consequence, there are finitely many complex homotopy types of unobstructed complex parallelisable nilmanifolds up to dimension 19, and infinitely many in dimension 20.