Homogeneity on three-dimensional contact metric manifolds (Q1969008)

In [Ill. J. Math. 42, 243-256 (1998; Zbl 0906.53031) the second author classified 3-dimensional simply connected homogeneous contact metric manifolds. The main purpose of the present paper is to study other forms of homogeneity. For a contact metric manifold, denote by \(\eta\) the contact form, by \(\xi\) the characteristic vector field and by \(g\) the associated metric in question. Denoting the Ricci tensor of \(g\) by \(\rho\), define a 1-form \(\sigma\) by \(\sigma=\rho (\xi,.)|_{\text{ker} \eta}\). A Riemannian manifold such that the volume of all sufficiently small geodesic balls depends only on the radius is called a ball-homogeneous space. The authors pove that a 3-dimensional contact metric manifold is locally isometric to a unimodular Lie group equipped with a left-invariant contact metric structure if and only if it is ball-homogeneous and \(\sigma=0\). A 3-dimensional Riemannian manifold is curvature homogeneous if the eigenvalues of the Ricci operator are constant and the authors show that in the preceding result ball-homogeneity may be replaced by curvature homogeneity. Let \(\tau={\mathcal L}_\xi g\) and \(W\) be the Webster scalar curvature. If \(\tau=0\), a 3-dimensional simply connected complete contact metric manifold is naturally reductive if and only if \(W\) is constant. If \(\tau\neq 0\), a 3-dimensional simply connected complete contact metric manifold is naturally reductive if and only if \(\sigma=0\) and \(W=1 \pm\|\tau\|/ 4\sqrt 2=\) constant. The authors also show that a 3-dimensional conformally flat contact metric manifold with \(\sigma=0\) has constant curvature 0 or 1. Other conditions studied in the paper include: cyclic-parallel Ricci tensor, the Ricci tensor being a Codazzi tensor, locally \(\varphi\)-symmetric spaces, and \(\xi\) belonging to the \((k,\mu)\)-nullity distribution.