Totally geodesic submanifolds of Damek-Ricci spaces and Einstein hypersurfaces of the Cayley projective plane

Abstract: We classify totally geodesic submanifolds of Damek-Ricci spaces and show that they are either homogeneous (such submanifolds are known to be "smaller" Damek-Ricci spaces) or isometric to rank-one symmetric spaces of negative curvature. As a by-product, we obtain that a totally geodesic submanifold of any known harmonic manifold is by itself harmonic. We prove that the Cayley hyperbolic plane admits no Einstein hypersurfaces and that the only Einstein hypersurfaces in the Cayley projective plane are geodesic spheres of a particular radius; this completes the classification of Einstein hypersurfaces in rank-one symmetric spaces. We also show that if a $2$-stein space admits a $2$-stein hypersurface, then both are of constant curvature, under some additional conditions.