E. Cartan proved that conformally flat hypersurfaces in S^{n+1} for n>3 have at most two distinct principal curvatures and locally envelop a one-parameter family of (n-1)-spheres. We prove that the Gauss-Codazzi equation for conformally flat hypersurfaces in S^4 is a soliton equation, and use a dressing action from soliton theory to construct geometric Ribaucour transforms of these hypersurfaces. We describe the moduli of these hypersurfaces in S^4 and their loop group symmetries. We also generalise these results to conformally flat n-immersions in (2n-2)-spheres with flat normal bundle and constant multiplicities.
We prove that any conformally flat submanifold with flat normal bundle in a conformally flat Riemannian manifold is locally holonomic, that is, admits a principal coordinate system. As one of the consequences of this fact, it is shown that the Ribaucour transformation can be used to construct an associated large family of immersions with induced conformal metrics holonomic with respect to the same coordinate system.
In this note, we investigate conformally flat submanifolds of Euclidean space with positive index of relative nullity. Let $M^n$ be a complete conformally flat manifold and let $f\colon M^n\to \R^m$ be an isometric immersion. We prove the following results: (1) If the index of relative nullity is at least two, then $M^n$ is flat and $f$ is a cylinder over a flat submanifold. (2) If the scalar curvature of $M^n$ is non-negative and the index of relative nullity is positive, then $f$ is a cylinder over a submanifold with constant non-negative sectional curvature. (3) If the scalar curvature of $…
In Part I, we develop the notions of a Moebius structure and a conformal Cartan geometry, establish an equivalence between them; we use them in Part II to study submanifolds of conformal manifolds in arbitrary dimension and codimension. We obtain Gauss-Codazzi-Ricci equations and a conformal Bonnet theorem characterizing immersed submanifolds of the conformal n-sphere. These methods are applied in Part III to study constrained Willmore surfaces, isothermic surfaces, Guichard surfaces and conformally-flat submanifolds with flat normal bundle, and their spectral deformations, in arbitrary codime…
A submanifold in space forms satisfies the well-known DDVV inequality due to De Smet, Dillen, Verstraelen and Vrancken. The submanifold attaining equality in the DDVV inequality at every point is called Wintgen ideal submanifold. As conformal invariant objects, Wintgen ideal submanifolds are studied in this paper using the framework of Möbius geometry. We classify Wintgen ideal submanfiolds of dimension $m>2$ and arbitrary codimension when a canonically defined 2-dimensional distribution $\mathbb{D}$ is integrable. Such examples come from cones, cylinders, or rotational submanifolds over super…
We describe how the loop group maps corresponding to special submanifolds associated to integrable systems may be thought of as certain Grassmann submanifolds of infinite dimensional homogeneous spaces. In general, the associated families of special submanifolds are certain Grassmann submanifolds. An example is given from recent work of the author.
We show that every spherical 2-Dupin submanifold that is not a hypersurface is conformally congruent to the standard embedding of the real, complex, quaternionic or octonionic projective plane. We also classify 2-CPC, 2-umbilical and weakly 2-umbilical submanifolds in space forms.
In this paper, we present some new properties for p-biharmonic hypersurfaces in Riemannian manifold. We also characterize the p-biharmonic submanifolds in an Einstein space. We construct a new example of proper p-biharmonic hypersurfaces. We present some open problems.
A locally conformally Kahler (LCK) manifold is a manifold which is covered by a Kahler manifold, with the deck transform group acting by homotheties. We show that the blow-up of a compact LCK manifold along a complex submanifold admits an LCK structure if and only if this submanifold is globally conformally Kahler. We also prove that a twistor space (of a compact 4-manifold, a quaternion-Kahler manifold or a Riemannian m anifold) cannot admit an LCK metric, unless it is Kahler.
We classify biharmonic submanifolds with certain geometric properties in Euclidean spheres. For codimension 1, we determine the biharmonic hypersurfaces with at most two distinct principal curvatures and the conformally flat biharmonic hypersurfaces. We obtain some rigidity results for pseudo-umbilical biharmonic submanifolds of codimension 2 and for biharmonic surfaces with parallel mean curvature vector field. We also study the type, in the sense of B-Y. Chen, of compact proper biharmonic submanifolds with constant mean curvature in spheres.
We solve the problem of describing all nonlocal Hamiltonian operators of hydrodynamic type with flat metrics. This problem is also equivalent to the description of all flat submanifolds with flat normal bundle in a pseudo-Euclidean space. It is proved that every such Hamiltonian operator (or the submanifold corresponding to the operator) gives a pencil of compatible Poisson brackets, generates bi-Hamiltonian integrable hierarchies of hydrodynamic type, and also defines a family of integrals in involution. We prove that a natural special class of such Hamiltonian operators (submanifolds) is des…
Using a combination of techniques from conformal and complex geometry, we show the potentialization of 4-dimensional closed Einstein-Weyl structures which are half-algebraically special and admit a "half-integrable" almost-complex structure. That is, we reduce the Einstein-Weyl equations to a single, conformally invariant, non-linear scalar equation, that we call the "conformal HH equation", and we reconstruct the conformal structure (curvature and metric) from a solution to this equation. We show that the conformal metric is composed of: a conformally flat part, a conformally half-flat part r…
In this paper we study several aspects of the geometry of conformally stationary Lorentz manifolds, and particularly of GRW spaces, due to the presence of a closed conformal vector field. More precisely, we begin by extending to these spaces a result of J. Simons on the minimality of cones in Euclidean space, and apply it to the construction of complete, noncompact maximal submanifolds of both de Sitter and anti-de Sitter spaces. Then we state and prove very general Bernstein-type theorems for spacelike hypersurfaces in conformally stationary Lorentz manifolds, one of which not assuming the hy…
R Kerr's Ricci-flat Lorentz 4-manifold was shown by B Carter in 1968 to support a classically completely integrable system of geodesics; here we interpret this system in terms of a locally conformally symplectic structure, which we identify (§2.2) using characteristic classes defined by Kerr-Schild Cartesian coordinates (regarded as a map to the Cayley-Penrose compactification of Minkowski space). This leads to the definition of an interesting cobordism category of contact 3-manifolds and 4-dimensional locally conformally symplectic cobordisms between them.
A k-submanifold L of an open n-manifold M is called weakly integrable (WI) [resp. strongly integrable (SI)] if there exists a submersion Φ:M\to R^{n-k} such that L\subset Φ^{-1}(0) [resp. L= Φ^{-1}(0)]. In this work we study the following problem, first stated in a particular case by Costa et al. (Invent. Math. 1988): which submanifolds L of an open manifold M are WI or SI? For general M, we explicitly solve the case k=n-1 and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for submanifolds to be WI and SI in higher codimension. As particular cases we recover the theorem of Bouma and Hector (Indag…
The squashed 7-sphere $S^{7}$ is a 7-sphere with an Einstein metric given by the canonical variation and its cone $\mathbb{R}^{8} - \{ 0 \}$ has full holonomy ${\rm Spin}(7)$. There is a canonical calibrating 4-form $Φ$ on $\mathbb{R}^{8} - \{ 0 \}$. A minimal 3-submanifold in $S^{7}$ is called associative if its cone is calibrated by $Φ$. In this paper, we classify two types of fundamental associative submanifolds in the squashed $S^{7}$. One is obtained by the intersection with a 4-plane and the other is homogeneous. Then we study their infinitesimal associative deformations and explicitly s…
The Willmore energy, alias bending energy or rigid string action, and its variation-the Willmore invariant-are important surface conformal invariants with applications ranging from cell membranes to the entanglement entropy in quantum gravity. In work of Andersson, Chrusciel, and Friedrich, the same invariant arises as the obstruction to smooth boundary asymptotics to the Yamabe problem of finding a metric in a conformal class with constant scalar curvature. We use conformal geometry tools to describe and compute the asymptotics of the Yamabe problem on a conformally compact manifold and thus …
By a theorem of Mclean, the deformation space of an associative submanifold Y of an integrable G_2 manifold (M,ϕ) can be identified with the kernel of a Dirac operator D:Ω^{0}(ν) -->Ω^{0}(ν) on the normal bundle νof Y. Here, we generalize this to the non-integrable case, and also show that the deformation space becomes smooth after perturbing it by natural parameters, which corresponds to moving Y through `pseudo-associative' submanifolds. Infinitesimally, this corresponds to twisting the Dirac operator D --> D_{A} with connections A of ν. Furthermore, the normal bundles of the associative sub…
Starting from suitable tableaux over finite dimensional Lie algebras, we provide a scheme for producing involutive linear Pfaffian systems related to various classes of submanifolds in homogeneous spaces which constitute integrable systems. These include isothermic surfaces, Willmore surfaces, and other classical soliton surfaces. Completely integrable equations such as the G/G_0-system of Terng and the curved flat system of Ferus-Pedit may be obtained as special cases of this construction. Some classes of surfaces in projective differential geometry whose Gauss-Codazzi equations are associate…
Let $Gr(d,n)$ be the Grassmannian of $d$-dimensional linear subspaces of an $n$-dimensional vector space $V$. A submanifold $X\subset Gr(d, n)$ gives rise to a differential system $Σ(X)$ that governs $d$-dimensional submanifolds of $V$ whose Gaussian image is contained in $X$. We investigate a special case of this construction where $X$ is a sixfold in $Gr(4, 6)$. The corresponding system $Σ(X)$ reduces to a pair of first-order PDEs for 2 functions of 4 independent variables. Equations of this type arise in self-dual Ricci-flat geometry. Our main result is a complete description of integrable …
We prove that the associativity equations of two-dimensional topological quantum field theories are very natural reductions of the fundamental nonlinear equations of the theory of submanifolds in pseudo-Euclidean spaces and give a natural class of potential flat torsionless submanifolds. We show that all potential flat torsionless submanifolds in pseudo-Euclidean spaces bear natural structures of Frobenius algebras on their tangent spaces. These Frobenius structures are generated by the corresponding flat first fundamental form and the set of the second fundamental forms of the submanifolds (i…
This article is a local analysis of integrable GL(2)-structures of degree 4. A GL(2)-structure of degree n corresponds to a distribution of rational normal cones over a manifold M of dimension (n+1). Integrability corresponds to the existence of many submanifolds that are spanned by lines in the cones. These GL(2)-structures are important because they naturally arise from a certain family of second-order hyperbolic PDEs in three variables that are integrable via hydrodynamic reduction. Familiar examples include the wave equation, the first flow of the dKP equation, and the Boyer--Finley equati…
In this article, we construct a new para-Kähler structure $({\mathcal G},{\mathcal J},Ω)$ in the space of oriented geodesics ${\mathbb L}(M)$ in a non-flat, real space form $M$. We first show that the para-Kähler metric ${\mathcal G}$ is scalar flat and when $M$ is a 3-dimensional real space form, ${\mathcal G}$ is locally conformally flat. Furthermore, we prove that the space of oriented geodesics in hyperbolic $n$-space, equipped with the constructed metric ${\mathcal G}$, is minimally isometric embedded in the tangent bundle of the hyperbolic $n$-space. We then study the submanifold theory,…
We identify R^7 as the pure imaginary part of octonions. Then the multiplication in octonions gives a natural almost complex structure for the unit 6-sphere. It is known that a cone over a surface M in S^6 is an associative submanifold of R^7 if and only if M is almost complex in S^6. In this paper, we show that the Gauss-Codazzi equation for almost complex curves in S^6 is the equation for primitive maps associated to the 6-symmetric space G_2/T^2, and use this to explain some of the known results. Moreover, the equation for S^1-symmetric almost complex curves in S^6 is the periodic Toda latt…
The Hodge star mean curvature flow on a 3-dimension Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian manifold, the geometric Airy flow on a Riemannian manifold, the Schrodingier flow on Hermitian manifolds, and the shape operator curve flow on submanifolds are natural non-linear dispersive curve flows in geometric analysis. A curve flow is integrable if the evolution equation of the local differential invariants of a solution of the curve flow is a soliton equation. For example, the Hodge star mean curvature flow on $R^3$ and on $R^{2,1}$, the geometric Airy flow on $R^n$, the Schrodingier flow on compact Herm…
The quaternionic KP hierarchy is the integrable hierarchy of p.d.e obtained by replacing the complex numbers with the quaternions, mutatis mutandis, in the standard construction of the KP hierarchy equations and solutions; it is equivalent to what is often called the Davey-Stewartson II hierarchy. This article studies its relationship with the theory of quaternionic holomorphic 2-tori in HP^1 (which are equivalent to conformally immersed 2-tori in S^4). After describing how the Sato-Segal-Wilson construction of KP solutions (particularly solutions of finite type) carries over to this quaternio…
This article determines the spectral data, in the integrable systems sense, for all weakly conformally immersed Hamiltonian stationary Lagrangian in $\R^4$. This enables us to describe their moduli space and the locus of branch points of such an immersion. This is also an informative example in integrable systems geometry, since the group of ambient isometries acts non-trivially on the spectral data and the relevant energy functional (the area) need not be constant under deformations by higher flows.
Let $σ$ be an involution of a real semi-simple Lie group $U$, $U_0$ the subgroup fixed by $σ$, and $U/U_0$ the corresponding symmetric space. Ferus and Pedit called a submanifold $M$ of a rank $r$ symmetric space $U/U_0$ a {\it curved flat} if $T_pM$ is tangent to an $r$-dimensional flat of $U/U_0$ at $p$ for each $p\in M$. They noted that the equation for curved flats is an integrable system. Bryant used the involution $σ$ to construct an involutive exterior differential system $\ci_σ$ such that integral submanifolds of $\ci_σ$ are curved flats. Terng used $r$ first flows in the $U/U_0$-hiera…
