Motivated by the possible characterization of Sasakian manifolds in terms of twistor forms, we give the complete classification of compact Riemannian manifolds carrying a Killing vector field whose covariant derivative (viewed as a 2–form) is a twistor form.

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We prove that if a connected Lie group action on a complete Riemannian manifold preserves the geodesics (considered as unparameterized curves), then the metric has constant positive sectional curvature, or the group acts by affine transformations.

We consider an ancient solution g(·, t) of the Ricci flow on a compact surface that exists for t 2 (−1, T ) and becomes spherical at time t = T . We prove that the metric g(·, t) is either a family of contracting spheres, which is a type I ancient solution, or a King–Rosenau solution, which is a type II ancient solution.

In this note, we study submanifold geometry of the Atiyah--Hitchin manifold, a double cover of the 2-monopole moduli space, which plays an important role in various settings such as the supersymmetric background of string theory. When the manifold is naturally identified as the total space of a line bundle over S^2, the zero section is a distinguished minimal 2-sphere of considerable interest. In particular, there has been a conjecture about the uniqueness of this minimal 2-sphere among all closed minimal 2-surfaces. We show that this minimal 2-sphere satisfies the ``strong stability condition" proposed in our earlier work, and confirm the global uniqueness as a corollary.