Circles on quaternionic space forms (Q1817364)

A curve \(\gamma\) in a Riemannian manifold \(M\) is called a circle if it is parametrized by arc length and satisfies \(\nabla_XX=\kappa Y\) and \(\nabla_YY=-\kappa X\) for some constant \(\kappa>0\) and some unit vector field \(Y\) along \(\gamma\), where \(\nabla\) is the Levi-Civita connection of \(M\) and \(X\) is the unit tangent vector field of \(\gamma\). Suppose \(M\) is the quaternionic projective or hyperbolic space equipped with its standard Riemannian metric. The torsion \(\theta\in[0,1]\) of \(\gamma\) is defined as the length of the orthogonal projection of \(X\) onto the quaternionic span of \(Y\) (this definition is independent of the parameter). The author investigates the structure of circles (e.g. closed, non-closed, bounded, non-bounded) in dependence on values of the torsion \(\theta\). The investigations are carried out by studying the horizontal lifts of circles to the fibre space of the corresponding Hopf map onto \(M\).