THE TRANSFORMATION GROUPS AND THE ISOMETRY GROUPS

Methods of Riemannian geometry has played an important role in the study of compact transformation groups. Every effective action of a compact Lie group on a differential manifold leaves a Riemannian metric invariant and the study of such actions reduces to the one involving the group of isometries of a Riemannian metric on the manifold which is, a priori, a Lie group under the compact open topology. Once an action of a compact Lie group is given an invariant metric is easily constructed by the averaging method and the Lie group is naturally imbedded in the group of isometries as a Lie subgroup. But usually this invariant metric has more symmetries than those given by the original action. Therefore the first question one may ask is when one can find a Riemannian metric so that the given action coincides with the action of the full group of isometries. This seems to be a difficult question to answer which depends very much on the orbit structure and the group itself. In this paper we give a sufficient condition that a subgroup action of a compact Lie group has an invariant metric which is not invariant under the full action of the group and figure out some aspects of the action and the orbit structure regarding the invariant Riemannian metric. In fact, according to our results, this is possible if there is a larger transformation group, containing the oringnal action and either having larger orbit somewhere or having exactly the same orbit structure but with an orbit on which a Riemannian metric is ivariant under the orginal action of the group and not under that of the larger one. Recently R. Saerens and W. Zame showed that every compact Lie group can be realized as the full group of isometries of Riemannian metric. [SZ] This answers a question closely related to ours but the situation turns out to be quite different in the two problems.