Symmetric spaces with dissecting involutions (Q2670686)

The authors call an involutive diffeomorphism of a connected smooth manifold \textit{dissecting} if the complement of its fixed point set is not connected. Dissecting involutions are closely related to constructive quantum field theory. In this article, the authors classify all pairs \((M, \sigma)\), where \(M\) is an irreducible connected symmetric space and \(\sigma\) is a dissecting involutive automorphism. In particular, they show that the only irreducible, connected and simply connected Riemannian symmetric spaces with dissecting isometric involutions are \(\mathbb{S}^n\) and \(\mathbb{H}^n\).