Riemannian manifolds with local symmetry

Abstract

We give a classification of many closed Riemannian manifolds M whose universal cover [Formula: see text] possesses a nontrivial amount of symmetry. More precisely, we consider closed Riemannian manifolds M such that [Formula: see text] has noncompact connected components. We prove that in many cases, such a manifold is as a fiber bundle over a locally homogeneous space. This is inspired by work of Eberlein (for non-positively curved manifolds) and Farb-Weinberger (for aspherical manifolds), and generalizes work of Frankel (for a semisimple group action). As an application, we characterize simply-connected Riemannian manifolds with both compact and finite volume noncompact quotients.