Geodesic orbit spaces in real flag manifolds

Abstract

We describe the invariant metrics on real flag manifolds and classify those with the following property: every geodesic is the orbit of a one-parameter subgroup. Such a metric is called g.o. (geodesic orbit). In contrast to the complex case, on real flag manifolds the isotropy representation can have equivalent submodules, which makes invariant metrics depend on more parameters and allows us to find more cases in which non-trivial g.o. metrics exist.