Totally geodesic submanifolds of naturally reductive homogeneous spaces (Q1375734)

As is well-known, the non-flat real space forms are the only irreducible symmetric spaces which admit a totally geodesic hypersurface. In this paper, the author extends this result to the class of simply connected, irreducible naturally reductive spaces of dimensions 3, 4 and 5. The proof is based on the classifications obtained by O. Kowalski and the reviewer, together with a necessary and sufficient condition, derived in the paper, for the existence of totally geodesic submanifolds in terms of the Lie algebra of a transitive Lie group of isometries of the naturally reductive space. This last result generalizes the use of Lie triple systems for the symmetric case. The classification result proved in this paper also holds for arbitrary dimension as proved by \textit{K. Tsukada} [Osaka J. Math. 33, 697-707 (1996; Zbl 0871.53042)].