Totally geodesic hypersurfaces of homogeneous spaces

Abstract

We show that a simply connected Riemannian homogeneous space M which admits a totally geodesic hypersurface F is isometric to either (a) the Riemannian product of a space of constant curvature and a homogeneous space, or (b) the warped product of the Euclidean space and a homogeneous space, or (c) the twisted product of the line and a homogeneous space (with the warping/twisting function given explicitly). In the first case, F is also a Riemannian product; in the last two cases, it is a leaf of a totally geodesic homogeneous fibration. Case (c) can alternatively be characterised by the fact that M admits a Riemannian submersion onto the universal cover of the group SL(2) equipped with a particular left-invariant metric, and F is the preimage of the two-dimensional solvable totally geodesic subgroup.