Remarks on hypersurfaces in a unit sphere (Q6174623)

It is known that totally umbilical spheres and flat tori are the only complete surfaces immersed into the Euclidean sphere \(\mathbb S^3\) with constant mean curvature \(H\not=0\) and whose Gaussian curvature does not change sign. This is is a result due to \textit{D. A. Hoffman} [J. Differ. Geom. 8, 161--176 (1973; Zbl 0284.53040)]. As a consequence, such surfaces are isoparametric, i.e., their principal curvatures are constant functions. For hypersurfaces in \(\mathbb S^{n+1}\), we can define higher-order mean curvatures. If \(\Sigma\) is an oriented hypersurface in \(\mathbb S^{n+1}\) with principal curvatures \(\kappa_1,\dots,\kappa_n\) and \(1\leq r\leq n\), the \(r\)-th mean curvature \(H_r\) is defined as \[ \binom{n}{r}H_r=\sum_{1\leq i_1<\cdots<i_r\leq n}\kappa_{i_1}\cdots\kappa_{i_r}. \] In this paper, the author proves that the above result does not extend to hypersurfaces in \(\mathbb S^{n+1}\), \(n\geq 3\), with constant higher-order mean curvature \(H_r\) (\(2\leq r<n\)) and whose Gauss-Kronecker curvature does not change sign, by showing the existence of nonisoparametric hypersurfaces. Besides, he also derives estimates for the infimum and the supremum of the principal curvatures of a hypersurface with constant higher-order mean curvature.