Hopf fibrations and totally geodesic submanifolds

Abstract

We classify totally geodesic submanifolds in Hopf-Berger spheres, which constitute a special family of homogeneous spaces diffeomorphic to spheres constructed via Hopf fibrations. As a byproduct of our investigations, we have discovered very intriguing examples of totally geodesic submanifolds. In particular, we stand out the following three: totally geodesic submanifolds isometric to real projective spaces, uncountably many isometric but non-congruent totally geodesic submanifolds, and a totally geodesic submanifold that is not extrinsically homogeneous. Remarkably, all these examples only arise in certain Hopf-Berger spheres with positive curvature.

Minor changes. To appear in JEMS (Journal of the European Mathematical Society)