Singularities of affine equidistants: extrinsic geometry of surfaces in 4-space

Abstract

For a generic embedding of a smooth closed surface $M$ into $\mathbb R^4$, the subset of $\mathbb R^4$ which is the affine $\lambda$-equidistant of $M$ appears as the discriminant set of a stable mapping $M \times M \to \mathbb R^4$, hence their stable singularities are $A_k, \, k=2, 3, 4,$ and $C_{2,2}^{\pm}$. In this paper, we characterize these stable singularities of $\lambda$-equidistants in terms of the bi-local extrinsic geometry of the surface, leading to a geometrical study of the set of weakly parallel points on $M$.