We study curvature functionals for immersed 2-spheres in a compact, three-dimensional Riemannian manifold M. Under the assumption that the sectional curvature of M is strictly positive, we prove the existence of a smoothly immersed sphere minimizing the L^{2} integral of the second fundamental form. Assuming instead that the sectional curvature is less than or equal to 2, and that there exists a point in M with scalar curvature bigger than 6, we obtain a smooth 2-sphere minimizing the integral of 1/4|H|^{2} +1, where H is the mean curvature vector.
Let $\mathcal{A}$ be a class of immersed surfaces in a three-manifold $M$, and assume that $\mathcal{A}$ is modeled by an elliptic PDE over each tangent plane. In this paper we solve the so-called Hopf uniqueness problem for the class $\mathcal{A}$ under the only mild assumption of the existence of a transitive family of candidate surfaces $\mathcal{S}\subset \mathcal{A}$. Specifically, we prove that any compact immersed surface of genus zero in the class $\mathcal{A}$ is a candidate sphere. This theorem unifies and extends many previous uniqueness results of different contexts. As an applicat…
We provide a lower value for the volume of a unit vector field tangent to an antipodally Euclidean sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$ depending on the length of an ellipse determined by the indexes of its singularities. In addition, for minimizing vector fields having specific pair of indexes, we show that their image coincides with the image of minimally immersed Klein bottles.
We show that Lawson's bipolar surface $\tildeτ_{3,1}$ is after stereographic projection the unique minimizer among immersed Klein bottles in its conformal class. We conjecture that it actually is the unique minimizer among immersed Klein bottles into $\mathbb{R}^n$, $n\geq 4$, whose existence the authors and P. Breuning proved in a previous paper.
We show that the extrinsic diameter of immersed flat tori in the 3-sphere is $π$ under a certain topological condition for the projection of their asymptotic curves with respect to the Hopf fibration.
Let $M$ be a simply connected homogeneous three-manifold with isometry group of dimension $4$, and let $Σ$ be any compact surface of genus zero immersed in $M$ whose mean, extrinsic and Gauss curvatures satisfy a smooth elliptic relation $Φ(H,K_e,K)=0$. In this paper we prove that $Σ$ is a sphere of revolution, provided that the unique inextendible rotational surface $S$ in $M$ that satisfies this equation and touches its rotation axis orthogonally has bounded second fundamental form. In particular, we prove that: (i) any elliptic Weingarten sphere immersed in $\mathbb{H}^2\times \mathbb{R}$ i…
A smooth four manifold is of finite type $r$ if its Donaldson invariant satisfies D((x^2-4)^r)=0. We prove that every simply connected manifold is of finite type by using the structure of Donaldson invariants in the presence of immersed spheres. More precisely we prove that if a manifold X contains an immersed sphere with $p$ positive double points and a non-negative self-intersection $a$, then it is of finite type with r = [(2p+2-a)/4].
We introduce and study co-dimension one area-minimizing locally rectifiable currents $T$ with $C^{1,α}$ tangentially immersed boundary: $\partial T$ is locally a finite sum of orientable co-dimension two submanifolds which only intersect tangentially with equal orientation. We show that any such $T$ is supported in a smooth hypersurface near any point on the support of $\partial T$ where $T$ has tangent cone which is a hyperplane with constant orientation but non-constant multiplicity. We also introduce and study co-dimensional one area-minimizing locally rectifiable currents $T$ with boundary…
We study curvature functionals for immersed 2-spheres in non-compact, three-dimensional Riemannian manifold $(M,h)$ without boundary. First, under the assumption that $(M,h)$ is the euclidean 3-space endowed with a semi-perturbed metric with perturbation small in $C^1$ norm and of compact support, we prove that if there is some point $\bar{x} \in M$ with scalar curvature $R^M(\bar{x})>0$ then there exists a smooth embedding $f:S^2 \hookrightarrow M$ minimizing the Willmore functional $1/4\int |H|^2$, where $H$ is the mean curvature. Second, assuming that $(M,h)$ is of bounded geometry (i.e. bo…
We give partial boundary regularity for co-dimension one absolutely area-minimizing currents at points where the boundary consists of a sum of $C^{1,α}$ submanifolds, possibly with multiplicity, meeting tangentially, given that the current has a tangent cone supported in a hyperplane with constant orientation vector; this partial regularity is such that we can conclude the tangent cone is unique. The proof follows closely the boundary regularity result given by Hardt and Simon in [9].
We give partial boundary regularity for co-dimension one absolutely area-minimizing currents at points where the boundary consists of a sum of $C^{1,α}$ submanifolds, possibly with multiplicity, meeting tangentially, given that the current has a tangent cone supported in a hyperplane with constant orientation vector; this partial regularity is such that we can conclude the tangent cone is unique. The proof closely follows that giving the boundary regularity result of Hardt and Simon.
For an immersed Lagrangian submanifold, let $\check{A}$ be the Lagrangian trace-free second fundamental form. In this note we consider the equation $\nabla^*T=0$ on Lagrangian surfaces immersed in $\mathbb{C}^2$, where $T=-2\nabla^*(\check{A}\lrcornerω)$, and we prove a gap theorem for the Whitney sphere as a solution to this equation.
As is known, the Blaschke tensor $A$ (a symmetric covariant $2$-tensor) is one of the fundamental Möbius invariants in the Möbius differential geometry of submanifolds in the unit sphere $\mathbb S^n$, and the eigenvalues of $A$ are referred to as the Blaschke eigenvalues. In this paper, we shall prove a classification theorem for immersed umbilic-free submanifolds in $\mathbb S^n$ with a parallel Blaschke tensor. For proving this classification, some new kinds of examples are first defined.
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…
We study $n$-dimensional area-minimizing currents $T$ in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1},$ with boundary $\partial T$ satisfying two properties: $\partial T$ is locally a finite sum of $(n-1)$-dimensional $C^{1,α}$ orientable submanifolds which only meet tangentially and with same orientation, for some $α\in (0,1]$; $\partial T$ has mean curvature $=h ν_{T}$ where $h$ is a Lipschitz scalar-valued function and $ν_{T}$ is the generalized outward pointing normal of $\partial T$ with respect to $T.$ We give a partial boundary regularity result for such currents $T.$ We show that near any point $x$ in the suppor…
We prove that a sequence of possibly branched, weak immersions of the two-sphere $S^2$ into an arbitrary compact riemannian manifold $(M^m,h)$ with uniformly bounded area and uniformly bounded $L^2-$norm of the second fundamental form either collapse to a point or weakly converges as current, modulo extraction of a subsequence, to a Lipschitz mapping of $S^2$ and whose image is made of a connected union of finitely many, possibly branched, weak immersions of $S^2$ with finite total curvature. We prove moreover that if the sequence belongs to a class $γ$ of $π_2(M^m)$ the limiting lipschitz map…
We give a sharp upper bound for the area of a minimal two-sphere in a three-manifold (M,g) with positive scalar curvature. If equality holds, we show that the universal cover of (M,g) is isometric to a cylinder.
As is known, the Blaschke tensor $A$ (a symmetric covariant $2$-tensor) is one of the fundamental Möbius invariants in the Möbius differential geometry of submanifolds in the unit sphere $\mathbb S^n$, and the eigenvalues of $A$ are referred to as the Blaschke eigenvalues. In this paper, we continue our job for the study on the submanifolds in $\bbs^n$ with parallel Blaschke tensors which we simply call {\em Blaschke parallel submanifolds} to find more examples and seek a complete classification finally. The main theorem of this paper is the classification of Blaschke parallel submanifolds in …
We prove a uniqueness theorem for immersed spheres of prescribed (non-constant) mean curvature in homogeneous three-manifolds. In particular, this uniqueness theorem proves a conjecture by A.D. Alexandrov about immersed spheres of prescribed Weingarten curvature in R3 for the special but important case of prescribed mean curvature. As a consequence, we extend the classical Hopf uniqueness theorem for constant mean curvature spheres to the case of immersed spheres of prescribed antipodally symmetric mean curvature in R3.
Let $ X: M \hook S^5$ be a compact Legendrian surface in pseudoconformal(CR) 5-sphere. We introduce a pseudoconformally invariant Willmore type second order functional $ \W(X)$, and study its critical points called Willmore Legendrian surfaces. The fifth order structure equations show that Willmore dual can be defined for a class of Willmore Legendrian surfaces. Moreover when this dual is constant, Willmore Legendrian surface admits a Weierstraßtype representation in terms of immersed meromorphic curve in $ \C^2$ satisfying an appropriate real period condition via pseudoconformal stereographic…
We extend the results of our recent preprint [arXiv: 1811.00515] into higher dimensions $n \geq 4$. For minimizing harmonic maps $u\in W^{1,2}(Ω,\mathbb{S}^2)$ from $n$-dimensional domains into the two dimensional sphere we prove: (1) An extension of Almgren and Lieb's linear law, namely \[\mathcal{H}^{n-3}(\textrm{sing} u) \le C \int_{\partial Ω} |\nabla_T u|^{n-1} \,d\mathcal{H}^{n-1};\] (2) An extension of Hardt and Lin's stability theorem, namely that the size of singular set is stable under small perturbations in $W^{1,n-1}$ norm of the boundary.
Let $K$ be a Klein bottle. We show that the infimum of the Willmore energy among all immersed Klein bottles in Euclidean $n$-space is attained by a smooth embedded Klein bottle, where $n\geq 4$. There are three distinct regular homotopy classes of immersed Klein bottles in the Euclidean four-space each one containing an embedding. One is characterized by the property that it contains the minimizer just mentioned. For the other two regular homotopy classes we show that the Willmore energy is bounded from below by $8π$. We give a classification of the minimizers of these two classes. In particul…
Using a hyperKähler rotation on complex structures of a Calabi-Yau 2-fold and rolling of an isotropic 2-submanifold in a symplectic 6-manifold, we construct, by gluing, a natural family of immersed Lagrangian deformations of a branched covering of a special Lagrangian 3-sphere in a Calabi-Yau 3-fold and study how they deviate from being deformable to a family of special Lagrangian deformations by examining in detail Joyce's criteria on this family. The result suggests a potential image-support rigidity of A-branes that wrap around a special Lagrangian 3-sphere in a Calabi-Yau 3-fold, which res…
A theorem by Almgren establishes that any minimal $2$-sphere immersed in $\mathbb{S}^3$ is a totally geodesic equator. In this paper we give a purely geometric extension of Almgren's result, by showing that any immersed, real analytic $2$-sphere in $\mathbb{S}^3$ that is saddle, i.e., of non-positive extrinsic curvature, must be an equator of $\mathbb{S}^3$. We remark that, contrary to Almgren's theorem, no geometric PDE is imposed on the surface. The result is not true for $C^{\infty}$ spheres.
We prove that two spheres of the same constant mean curvature in an arbitrary homogeneous three-manifold only differ by an ambient isometry, and we determine the values of the mean curvature for which such spheres exist. This gives a complete classification of immersed constant mean curvature spheres in three-dimensional homogeneous manifolds.
We prove that under some assumptions on the mean curvature the set of umbilical points of an immersed surface in a $3$-dimensional space form has positive measure. In case of an immersed sphere our result can be seen as a generalization of the celebrated Hopf theorem.
We consider closed immersed hypersurfaces evolving by surface diffusion flow, and perform an analysis based on local and global integral estimates. First we show that a properly immersed stationary (ΔH \equiv 0) hypersurface in \R^3 or \R^4 with restricted growth of the curvature at infinity and small total tracefree curvature must be an embedded union of umbilic hypersurfaces. Then we prove for surfaces that if the L^2 norm of the tracefree curvature is globally initially small it is monotonic nonincreasing along the flow. We also derive pointwise estimates for all derivatives of the curvatur…
We prove that finite area isolated singularities of surfaces with constant positive curvature in R^3 are removable singularities, branch points or immersed conical singularities. We describe the space of immersed conical singularities of such surfaces in terms of the class of real analytic closed locally convex curves in the 2-sphere with admissible cusp singularities, characterizing when the singularity is actually embedded. In the global setting, we describe the space of peaked spheres in R^3, i.e. compact convex surfaces of constant positive curvature with a finite number of singularities, …
Mannheim curves are defined for immersed curves in 3-dimensional sphere S^3 . The definition is given by considering the geodesics of S^3. First, two special geodesics, called principal normal geodesic and binormal geodesic, of S^3 are defined by using Frenet vectors of a curve immersed in S^3. Later, the curve alpha is called a Mannheim curve if there exits another curve beta in S^3 such that the principal normal geodesics of beta coincide with the binormal geodesics of S^3 . It is obtained that if alpha and beta form a Mannheim pair then there exist a constant lambda that is not equal 0 and …
A correspondence is established between a class of minimal immersed surfaces of $\mathbb{S}^3(2)$ and area-minimizing unit vector fields defined on the antipodally punctured unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^2\backslash\{N,S\}$. As a consequence, we establish a stability relation for Lawson cylinders in $\mathbb{S}^3(2)$.
We study the classification of immersed constant mean curvature (CMC) spheres in the homogeneous Riemannian 3-manifold Sol_3, i.e., the only Thurston 3-dimensional geometry where this problem remains open. Our main result states that, for every H>1/(\sqrt{3}), there exists a unique (up to left translations) immersed CMC H sphere S_H in Sol_3 (Hopf-type theorem). Moreover, this sphere S_H is embedded, and is therefore the unique (up to left translations) compact embedded CMC H surface in Sol_3 (Alexandrov-type theorem). The uniqueness parts of these results are also obtained for all real number…
We provide a lower value for the volume of a unit vector field tangent to an antipodally Euclidean sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$ depending on the length of an ellipse determined by the indexes of its singularities.
In 1968, Simons introduced the concept of index for hypersurfaces immersed into the Euclidean sphere S^{n+1}. Intuitively, the index measures the number of independent directions in which a given hypersurface fails to minimize area. The earliest results regarding the index focused on the case of minimal hypersurfaces. Many such results established lower bounds for the index. More recently, however, mathematicians have generalized these results to hypersurfaces with constant mean curvature. In this paper, we consider hypersurfaces of constant mean curvature immersed into the sphere and give low…
We give a complete classification of the immersed constant mean curvature spheres in a three-sphere with an arbitrary homogenous metric, by proving that for each $H\in\mathbb{R}$, there exists a constant mean curvature $H$-sphere in the space that is unique up to an ambient isometry.
We prove that the least area of the non-contractible immersed spheres is no more than $4π$ in any oriented compact manifold with dimension $n+2\leq 7$ which satisfies $R\geq 2$ and admits a map to $\mathbf S^2\times T^n$ with nonzero degree. We also prove a rigidity result for the equality case. This can be viewed as a generalization of the result in [2] to higher dimensions.
The volume of a k-dimensional foliation $\mathcal{F}$ in a Riemannian manifold $M^{n}$ is defined as the mass of image of the Gauss map, which is a map from M to the Grassmann bundle of k-planes in the tangent bundle. Generalizing a construction by Gluck and Ziller, "singular" foliations by 3-spheres are constructed on round spheres $S^{4n+3}$, as well as a singular foliation by 7-spheres on $S^{15}$, which minimize volume within their respective relative homology classes. These singular examples provide lower bounds for volumes of regular 3-dimensional foliations of $S^{4n+3}$ and regular 7-d…
In this paper we prove rigidity results for two-dimensional, closed, immersed, non-necessarily convex, self-similar solutions of a wide class of fully non-linear parabolic flows in $\mathbb{R}^3$. We show this self-similar solutions are the round spheres centered at the origin provided it has genus zero and satisfies a suitable upper pinching estimate for the Gaussian curvature. As applications, we obtain rigidity results for the round sphere as the only closed, immersed, genus zero, self-similar solution of several well known flows, as the flow of the powers of mean curvature, the harmonic me…
We prove the existence of immersed closed curves of constant geodesic curvature in an arbitrary Riemannian 2-sphere for almost every prescribed curvature. To achieve this, we develop a min-max scheme for a weighted length functional.
We prove the existence of branched immersed constant mean curvature 2-spheres in an arbitrary Riemannian 3-sphere for almost every prescribed mean curvature, and moreover for all prescribed mean curvatures when the 3-sphere is positively curved. To achieve this, we develop a min-max scheme for a weighted Dirichlet energy functional. There are three main ingredients in our approach: a bi-harmonic approximation procedure to obtain compactness of the new functional, a derivative estimate of the min-max values to gain energy upper bounds for min-max sequences for almost every choice of mean curvat…
We consider the sub-Riemannian $3$-sphere $(\mathbb{S}^3,g_h)$ obtained by restriction of the Riemannian metric of constant curvature $1$ to the planar distribution orthogonal to the vertical Hopf vector field. It is known that $(\mathbb{S}^3,g_h)$ contains a family of spherical surfaces $\{\mathcal{S}_λ\}_{λ\geq 0}$ with constant mean curvature $λ$. In this work we first prove that the two closed half-spheres of $\mathcal{S}_0$ with boundary $C_0=\{0\}\times\mathbb{S}^1$ minimize the sub-Riemannian area among compact $C^1$ surfaces with the same boundary. We also see that the only $C^2$ solut…
In this paper, we obtain a sufficient and necessary condition for a simply connected Riemannian manifold $(M^n, g)$ to be isometrically immersed, as a submanifold with codimension $p\geq 1$, into the product $S^k\times H^{n+p-k}$ of sphere and hyperboloid.
Let $n\ge 2$ and $k\ge 1$ be two integers. Let $M$ be an isometrically immersed closed $n$-submanifold of co-dimension $k$ that is homotopic to a point in a complete manifold $N$, where the sectional curvature of $N$ is no more than $δ<0$. We prove that the total squared mean curvature of $M$ in $N$ and the first non-zero eigenvalue $λ_1(M)$ of $M$ satisfies $$λ_1(M)\le n\left(δ+\frac{1}{\operatorname{Vol} M}\int_M |H|^2 \operatorname{dvol}\right).$$ The equality implies that $M$ is minimally immersed in a metric sphere after lifted to the universal cover of $N$. This completely settles an ope…
In this article, we show that, for any compact 3-manifold, there is a $C^{1}$ volume-minimizing one-dimensional foliation. More generally, we show the existence of mass-minimizing rectifiable sections of sphere bundles without isolated "pole points" in the base manifold. This same analysis is used to show that the examples, due to Sharon Pedersen, of potentially volume-minimizing rectifiable sections (rectifiable foliations) of the unit tangent bundle to $S^{2n+1}$ are not, in fact, volume minimizing.
Let $X$ denote a metric Lie group diffeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^3$ that admits an algebraic open book decomposition. In this paper we prove that if $Σ$ is an immersed surface in $X$ whose left invariant Gauss map is a diffeomorphism onto $\mathbb{S}^2$, then $Σ$ is an embedded sphere. As a consequence, we deduce that any constant mean curvature sphere of index one in $X$ is embedded.
We study the problem to extend an immersed circle f in the 2-dimensional sphere to an immersion of the disc. We analyze existence and uniqueness for this problems in terms of the combinatorial structure of a word assigned to f. Our techniques are based on ideas of Blank who studied the extension problem in case of a planar target.
In this paper we study curvature types of immersed surfaces in three-dimensional (normed or) Minkowski spaces. By endowing the surface with a normal vector field, which is a transversal vector field given by the ambient Birkhoff orthogonality, we get an analogue of the Gauss map. Then we can define concepts of principal, Gaussian, and mean curvatures in terms of the eigenvalues of the differential of this map. Considering planar sections containing the normal field, we also define normal curvatures at each point of the surface, and with respect to each tangent direction. We investigate the rel…
We establish a nice orthonormal frame field on a closed surface minimally immersed in a unit sphere $S^{n}$, under which the shape operators take very simple forms. Using this frame field, we obtain an interesting property $K+K^{N}=1$ for the Gauss curvature $K$ and the normal curvature $K^{N}$ if the Gauss curvature is positive. Moreover, using this property we obtain the pinching on the intrinsic curvature and normal curvature, the pinching on the normal curvature, respectively.
CMC-1 trinoids (i.e. constant mean curvature one immersed surface with three regular embedded ends) in hyperbolic 3-space H^3 are irreducible generically, and the irreducible ones have been classified. However, the reducible case has not yet been fully treated, so in this paper we give an explicit description of CMC-1 trinoids in H^3 that includes the reducible case.
The aim of this paper is to study Sasakian immersions of compact Sasakian manifolds into the odd-dimensional sphere equipped with the standard Sasakian structure. We obtain a complete classification of such manifolds in the Einstein and $η$-Einstein cases when the codimension of the immersion is $4$. Moreover, we exhibit infinite families of compact Sasakian $η$--Einstein manifolds which cannot admit a Sasakian immersion into any odd-dimensional sphere. Finally, we show that, after possibly performing a ${\mathcal {D}}$-homothetic deformation, a homogeneous Sasakian manifold can be Sasakian im…
