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: 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 arise in certain Hopf–Berger spheres with positive curvature.