On homogeneous geodesics and weakly symmetric spaces

In this paper, we establish a sufficient condition for a geodesic in a Riemannian manifold to be homogeneous, i.e. an orbit of an 1-parameter isometry group. As an application of this result, we provide a new proof of the fact that every weakly symmetric space is a geodesic orbit manifold, i.e. all its geodesics are homogeneous. We also study general properties of homogeneous geodesics, in particular, the structure of the closure of a given homogeneous geodesic. We present several examples where this closure is a torus of dimension ≥ 2 which is (respectively, is not) totally geodesic in the ambient manifold. Finally, we discuss homogeneous geodesics in Lie groups supplied with left-invariant Riemannian metrics.