Symmetries of Contact Metric Manifolds

We study the Lie algebra of infinitesimal isometries on compact Sasakian and K--contact manifolds. On a Sasakian manifold which is not a space form or 3--Sasakian, every Killing vector field is an infinitesimal automorphism of the Sasakian structure. For a manifold with K--contact structure, we prove that there exists a Killing vector field of constant length which is not an infinitesimal automorphism of the structure if and only if the manifold is obtained from the Konishi bundle of a compact pseudo--Riemannian quaternion--Kaehler manifold after changing the sign of the metric on a maximal negative distribution. We also prove that non--regular Sasakian manifolds are not homogeneous and construct examples with cohomogeneity one. Using these results we obtain in the last section the classification of all homogeneous Sasakian manifolds.