Polar actions on compact symmetric spaces which admit a totally geodesic principal orbit (Q1430025)

An isometric action of a compact Lie group on a Riemannian manifold is called polar if there exists a connected immersed submanifold which intersects the orbits orthogonally and meets all orbits. The author proves a criterion on the Lie algebra level for the polarity of an action on a compact symmetric space. This criterion is applied to show that if a polar action on an irreducible compact symmetric space has a nontrivial totally geodesic principal orbit, then the space is a sphere \(S^n = SO(n+1)/SO(n)\) and the action is conjugate to the action of \(SO(k+1)\) given by the standard embedding of \(SO(k+1)\) into \(SO(n+1)\) for some \(k \leq n\).