Totally geodesic embeddings of 7-manifolds in positively curved 13-manifolds (Q1882574)

There are not many known examples of manifolds of positive sectional curvature. All of them are constructed as homogeneous spaces or biquotients of compact Lie groups. These biquotients are the 6-dimensional space by Eschenburg and 7- and 13-dimensional infinite families by Eschenburg and Bazaikin respectively. In the middle of the 1990's following the idea to understand the known examples via totally geodesic embeddings between them the reviewer had found some totally geodesic embeddings of certain Aloff-Wallach (which are 7-dimensional homogeneous manifolds) and Eschenburg spaces into Berger (which is the 13-dimensional homogeneous manifold) and Bazaikin spaces explaining the coincidence of some known pinching constants for different spaces. In the present paper the problem of classification of these embeddings is studied in detail and it is proven that each Bazaikin space contains at least one and generically ten totally geodesically embedded Aloff-Wallach or Eschenburg spaces. The arguments are based on the new presentation of these spaces which is as follows. These spaces are realized as the quotients with respect to circle actions of 8- and 14-dimensional focal manifolds of some isoparametric hypersurface families in the 11- and 19-dimensional spheres respectively, the sphere \(S^{11}\) is the fixed point set of an isometric involution on \(S^{19}\), and the family in \(S^{11}\) arises as the intersection of the family in \(S^{19}\) with \(S^{11}\).