An intrinsic approach to Lichnerowicz conjecture (Q1971653)

A Riemannian manifold is called harmonic if the geodesic spheres around any point have constant mean curvature depending only on the radius of the sphere. A. Lichnerowicz showed that for dimension less than or equal to 4, such a manifold must be either flat or a locally symmetric space of rank one [see \textit{A. Lichnerowicz}, Bull. Soc. Math. France 72, 146-168 (1944; Zbl 0060.38506); \textit{A. L. Besse}, ``Manifolds all of whose geodesics are closed'', Springer Verlag, Berlin (1978; Zbl 0387.53010)]. He quite naturally asked whether the same was true in higher dimensions. Great progress was made in the case of compact simply connected harmonic manifolds [see \textit{A. L. Besse}, loc. cit.]. An interesting fact about compact harmonic spaces is the existence of a family of isometric minimal immersions into the round spheres in the eigenspaces of the Laplacian, now known as Besse's nice embeddings or helical immersions. \textit{Z. I. Szabó} successfully used them along with other known facts about harmonic manifolds to answer Lichnerowicz's query affirmatively for compact simply connected harmonic manifolds [J. Differ. Geom. 31, 1-28 (1990; Zbl 0686.53042)]. In the present paper, the author gives an intrinsic proof of Szabó's theorem in the sense that it avoids these nice embeddings. As a byproduct, one gets a simple criterion for a nonconstant polynomial to be a Jacobi polynomial with parameters \( a \) and \( b > -1 \) [\textit{G. Birkhoff} and \textit{G.-C. Rotta}, ``Ordinary differential equations'', John Wiley \& Sons, New York (1978; Zbl 0377.34001)].