Prescribed Riemannian Symmetries

Given a smooth free action of a compact connected Lie group $G$ on a smooth manifold $M$, we show that the space of $G$-invariant Riemannian metrics on $M$ whose automorphism group is precisely $G$ is open dense in the space of all $G$-invariant metrics, provided the dimension of $M$ is "sufficiently large" compared to that of $G$. As a consequence, it follows that every compact connected Lie group can be realized as the automorphism group of some compact connected Riemannian manifold. Along the way we also show, under less restrictive conditions on both dimensions and actions, that the space of $G$-invariant metrics whose automorphism groups preserve the $G$-orbits is dense $G_{\delta}$ in the space of all $G$-invariant metrics.