Symmetries of Eschenburg spaces and the Chern problem (Q863784)

The authors study the isometry groups of Eschenburg and Bazaikin spaces; these are simply connected manifolds of positive sectional curvature which are not homogeneous. In particular, the isometry group of any positively curved Eschenburg space is shown to have rank \(3\). The strategy is as follows. The authors first exhibit a connected group of isometries which arises naturally from the description of the space. They then make an analysis of orbit spaces and isotropy groups to show that it can not be enlarged to a group of larger dimension.