Topics in polar actions

Abstract

We wish to thank Uwe Semmelmann and Andreas Kollross for the invitation to give these lectures. We assume basic knowledge of isometric actions on Riemannian manifolds, including the normal slice theorem and the principal orbit type theorem. Lecture 1 introduces polar actions and culminates with Heintze, Liu and Olmos's argument to characterize them in terms of integrability of the distribution of normal spaces to the principal orbits. The other two lectures are devoted to two of Lytchak and Thorbergsson's results. In Lecture 2 we briefly review Riemannian orbifolds from the metric point of view, and explain their characterization of orbifold points in the orbit space of a proper and isometric action in terms of polarity of the slice representation above. In Lecture 3 we present their proof of the fact that variationally complete actions in the sense of Bott and Samelson on non-negatively curved manifolds are hyperpolar. The appendix contains explanations of some results used in the lectures, namely: a criterion for the polarity of isometric actions on symmetric spaces, a discussion of Cartan's and Hermann's criterions for the existence of totally geodesic submanifolds, and a more or less self-contained derivation of Wilking's transversal Jacobi equation.

On Weakly Reflective PF Submanifolds in Hilbert Spaces

“…Such a Σ is called a section, which is automatically totally geodesic in M. If Σ is flat with respect to the induced metric, then the action is called hyperpolar. For details of polar actions and hyperpolar actions, see [5] and references therein.…”