Weakly symmetric spaces in dimension five (Q678196)

A Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) is said to be weakly symmetric if and only if, for any two points \(p,q\in M\), there exists an isometry of \(M\) interchanging \(p\) and \(q\). These manifolds have been introduced by Selberg who proved that the algebra of all isometry-invariant differential operators on such a space is a commutative algebra. They extend the class of symmetric spaces and many examples have been discovered recently. In particular, J. Berndt and the reviewer proved that a simply connected Riemannian manifold of dimension \(\leq 4\) is weakly symmetric if and only if it is a naturally reductive space. In this paper, the authors extend this result to the case of 5-dimensional manifolds. A similar result has been proved in a different way by J. C. González-Dávila and the reviewer.