Breadth and characteristic sequence of nilpotent Lie algebras

The notion of breadth of a nilpotent Lie algebra was introduced by B. Khuhirun, K.C. Misra and E. Stitzinger and used to approach problems of classification up to isomorphism. In the present paper, we study this invariant in terms of characteristic sequence, another invariant introduced by M. Goze and J.M. Ancochea-Bermudez. This permits to complete the determination of Lie algebras of breadth 2 and to begin the work for Lie algebras with breadth greater than 2.