Totally geodesic orbits of isometries

DOI10.1023/A:1006510417098MaRDI QIDQ1268105zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Fabio Podestà, L. Verdiani

Publication date 25 May 1999

Published in Annals of Global Analysis and Geometry (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/dg-ga/9711012

zbMATH Keywords

cohomogeneity onepositive curvaturesingular orbitstotally geodesic

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Methods of global Riemannian geometry, including PDE methods; curvature restrictions (53C21) Compact Lie groups of differentiable transformations (57S15)

Abstract: We study cohomogeneity one Riemannian manifolds and we establish some simple criterium to test when a singular orbit is totally geodesic. As an application, we classify compact, positively curved Riemannian manifolds which are acted on isometrically by a non semisimple Lie group with an hypersurface orbit.

Review text

Let \(M\) be a complete Riemannian manifold and \(G\subset \text{Isom}(M)\) a closed connected subgroup. By definition, the cohomogeneity of \(G\) is the minimal codimension of a \(G\)-orbit in \(M\). The authors study the case when \(G\) has cohomogeneity one. Besides the orbits of maximal dimension, which are hypersurfaces, there are at most two orbits of smaller dimension. These orbits are called singular. The authors establish two simple sufficient criteria for a singular orbit \(S\) to be totally geodesic. E. g., they show that \(S\) is totally geodesic if the action of \(G\) on \(S\) is not (almost) effective. Let \(S\cong G/H\) be a singular orbit and denote by \(k\) the cohomogeneity of the \(H\)-action on \(S\). Then they also show that the inequality \[ 2\dim S+1< \dim M+k \] implies that \(S\) is totally geodesic. As an application, they prove that a singular orbit \(S\) which is two-point homogeneous is automatically totally geodesic. Finally, using results of Grove and Searle, they show that a positively curved Riemannian manifold \(M\) which admits a compact non-semisimple group of isometries of cohomogeneity one is diffeomorphic to a compact rank one symmetric space.

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Cited in

(8)

• Riemannian G-manifold with one-dimensional orbit space
• Cohomogeneity one actions on noncompact symmetric spaces with a totally geodesic singular orbit
• Compact geodesic orbit spaces with a simple isotropy group
• Totally geodesic singular orbits and symmetric singular orbits in cohomogeneity one Riemannian manifolds
• The Hopf conjecture for manifolds with low cohomogeneity or high symmetry rank
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2019890 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1785252 (Why is no real title available?)
• SU(3)-manifolds of cohomogeneity one

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