Rigidity of the Hopf fibration (Q2048886): Difference between revisions

In their paper the authors consider minimal mappings from the 3-sphere to the 2-sphere. In general, a mapping between Riemannian manifolds is called minimal if the graph is a minimal surface in the product manifold. The authors prove three main theorems concerning the rigidity of the Hopf fibration. In Theorem A they show that a map from an open subset of \(\mathbb S^3\) to the 2-sphere (both equipped with the round metric) with constant singular values and with graph whose second fundamental form has constant norm must be the (restriction of the) Hopf fibration up to isometries, or a constant map. In Theorem B, the authors show under a pinching condition for the Gauss map of a minimal submersion from \(\mathbb S^3\to\mathbb S^2\), that the map must be the Hopf fibration. And in the last theorem, it is shown that an equivariant minimal submersion must be the Hopf fibration. The paper is another nice work about the Hopf fibration and its beautiful geometric properties.