A compact minimal shadow boundary in Euclidean space is totally geodesic (Q1762471): Difference between revisions

The main issue of this paper is the theorem, that the shadow boundary of a compact minimal sub-manifold of an immersed surface in \(\mathbb R^{n+1}\) is totally geodesic if it is a compact minimal sub-manifold. Additionally, the relationship between the tangent vector of the shadow boundary and the principal directions of the shape operator is investigated. This way umbilic points can easily be detected via the shadow boundaries through such points: In these cases the shadow boundaries run orthogonally to the respective direction of the light ray. This statement holds at least for points with non-vanishing Gauss-Kronecker curvature. Generally, they prove that the shadow boundary -- under the aforementioned preliminaries -- contains at least two principal directions.