arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Miguel Ibieta Jimenez.
We investigate the deformable hypersurfaces of the conformally flat Riemannian products $\mathbb{H}^k\times \mathbb{S}^{n-k+1}$, $2\leq k\leq n-1$, of hyperbolic space and a sphere with constant sectional curvatures $-1$ and $1$, respectively.
Classifying the nonflat hypersurfaces in Euclidean space $f\colon M^n\to\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ that locally admit smooth infinitesimal deformations that preserve the Gauss map infinitesimally was a problem only considered by Schouten \cite{Sc} in 1928. He found two conditions that are necessary and sufficient, with the first one being the minimality of the submanifold. The second is a technical condition that does not clarify much about the geometric nature of the hypersurface. In that respect, the parametric solution of the problem given in this note yields that the submanifold has to be Kaehler.
The classical classifications of the locally isometrically deformable Euclidean hypersurfaces obtained by U. Sbrana in 1909 and E. Cartan in 1916 includes four classes, among them the one formed by submanifolds that allow just a single deformation. The question of whether these Sbrana-Cartan hypersurfaces do, in fact, exist was not addressed by either of them. Positive answers to this question were given by Dajczer-Florit-Tojeiro in 1998 for the ones called of hyperbolic type and by Dajczer-Florit in 2004 when of elliptic type which is the other possibility. In both cases the examples constructed are rather special. The main result of this paper yields an abundance of examples of hypersurfaces of either type and seems to point in the direction of a classification although that goal remains elusive.
A local description of the non-flat infinitesimally bendable Euclidean hypersurfaces was recently given by Dajczer and Vlachos \cite{DaVl}. From their classification, it follows that there is an abundance of infinitesimally bendable hypersurfaces that are not isometrically bendable. In this paper we consider the case of complete hypersurfaces $f\colon M^n\to\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$, $n\geq 4$. If there is no open subset where $f$ is either totally geodesic or a cylinder over an unbounded hypersurface of $\mathbb{R}^4$, we prove that $f$ is infinitesimally bendable only along ruled strips. In particular, if the hypersurface is simply connected, this implies that any infinitesimal bending of $f$ is the variational field of an isometric bending.