On Radon transforms on compact Lie groups

Abstract

We show that the Radon transform related to closed geodesics is injective on a Lie group if and only if the connected components are not homeomorphic to $S^1$ nor to $S^3$. This is true for both smooth functions and distributions. The key ingredients of the proof are finding totally geodesic tori and realizing the Radon transform as a family of symmetric operators indexed by nontrivial homomorphisms from $S^1$.