Injectivity radius and diameter of the manifolds of flags in the projective planes (Q1434215)

This paper contributes to the intrinsic geometry of the projective tangent bundles \({\mathbb{F}}_{{\mathbb{R}}}\), \({\mathbb{F}}_{{\mathbb{C}}}\), \({\mathbb{F}}_{{\mathbb{H}}}\), \({\mathbb{F}}_{{\mathbb{O}}}\) of the projective planes \({\mathbb{R}}{\mathbb{P}}^2\), \({\mathbb{C}}{\mathbb{P}}^2\), \({\mathbb{H}}{\mathbb{P}}^2\), \({\mathbb{O}}{\mathbb{P}}^2\). Among the compact manifolds, these ones are known to admit metrics with positive sectional curvature. The author shows that every one of these positively curved homogeneous metrics arises as the induced metric of a principal orbit \(O\) of an isometric cohomogeneity two action on a suitable rank 2 symmetric space. Moreover, the diameter of the flag manifolds equipped with their normal homogeneous metrics is computed. For all other homogeneous metrics on them with nonnegative sectional curvature lower diameter bounds are estimated in comparison with the injectivity radius.