Invariant contact metric structures on tangent sphere bundles of compact symmetric spaces

Abstract: A new characterization is provided for the class of compact rank-one symmetric spaces. Such spaces are the only symmetric spaces of compact type for which the standard vector field on their sphere bundles is Killing with respect to some invariant Riemannian metric. The set of all these metrics is determined, as well as the set of all those invariant contact metric structures with this characteristic vector field. Moreover, on tangent sphere bundles of compact symmetric spaces with rank greater than or equal to two, a family of invariant contact metric structures, which contains the standard structure, is obtained.