Geodesic orbit manifolds and Killing fields of constant length (Q1952460)

The author studies certain properties of Riemannian geodesic orbit manifolds, i.e. manifolds such that all geodesics are orbits of the isometry group. The main result he proves is that any abelian ideal of the Lie algebra of Killing vector fields consists of fields of constant length. For any \(X\) in such ideal, the derivative of \(g(X,X)\) with respect to any vector field \(Y\) is shown to be zero by proving that \(g_x([Y,X],X)\) is zero. The proof of this is based on the fact that an integral curve of a Killing field \(X\) through a point \(x\) is geodesic iff \(x\) is a critical point of the function \(y\to g_y(X,X)\). Further, the author uses this to give a new proof of a statement given by C. Gordon in 1996 that says that any Riemannian geodesic orbit manifold with nonpositive Ricci curvature is already a symmetric space. The proof goes by a decomposition of the manifold into the product of a Euclidean space and a geodesic orbit manifold with semisimple isometry group.