A characterisation of Manhart's relative normal vector fields

Abstract: In this article a relation between curvature functionals for surfaces in the Euclidean space and area functionals in relative differential geometry will be given. Relative differential geometry can be described as the geometry of surfaces in the affine space, endowed with a distinguished "relative normal vector field" which generalises the notion of unit normal vector field N from Euclidean differential geometry. A concise review of relative differential geometry will be presented. The main result, to which the title of this article refers, will be given in the third section. Here we consider, for a function

f

of two variables, relative normal vector fields of the form

f (H, K), N - g r a d_{I I} (f (H, K))

for non-degenerate surfaces in the Euclidean three-dimensional space. A comparison of the variation of the curvature functional

i n t f (H, K), d d O m e g a

with the relative area functional obtained from the above relative normal vector field, results in a distinguishing property for the one-parameter family of relative normal vector fields which was introduced by F. Manhart, and which is obtained by choosing

f (H, K) = | K |^{a l p h a}

(where we will assume that

a l p h a e q 1

). More precisely, the following will be shown in theorem~6: ``{The curvature functionals

(a s t)

for which the critical points coincide with the relative-minimal surfaces with respect to the relative normal vector field

(d a g g e r)

, are essentially those obtained from Manhart's family}." In the fourth section, we give a characterisation of the sphere by means of relations between the support function and the curvatures. In the last section, we combine the previously described results and arrive at a variational characterisation of the sphere.

Review text

Consider an oriented surface \(M\) in three dimensional affine space \({\mathbb A}^3\) with nowhere degenerate Blaschke metric. The set of all tangent and \({\mathbb A}^3\)-valued vector fields along \(M\) are denoted by \(X(M)\) and \({\bar X}(M)\) respectively. A vector field \(Y\in{\bar X}(M)\) is called a \textit{relative normalization} if for all \(p\in M\) holds \(Y(p)\not\in T_p M\) and \(D_V Y\in X(M)\) for all \(V\in X(M)\). Here, \(D\) denotes the standard connection in \({\mathbb A}^3\).NEWLINENEWLINELet \(f:D\rightarrow {\mathbb R}:(u,v)\mapsto f(u,v)\) be an arbitrary smooth, nowhere vanishing function of two variables, where \(D\) contains the set\(\{(u,v)\in {\mathbb R}^2\mid u^2\geq v \) and \(v\neq 0\}\). Then for any non degenerate surface in Euclidean space the vector field given by NEWLINE\[NEWLINEN^M_f=f(H,K)N-grad_{II}(f(H,K))NEWLINE\]NEWLINE is a relative normal vector field. Here \(N, H\) and \(K\) denote the Euclidean normal vector field, mean curvature and Gaussian curvature respectively and \(grad_{II}\) stands for the gradient with respect to the Euclidean second fundamental form.NEWLINENEWLINEThe critical points of the relative area element are the relative minimal surfaces characterized by vanishing of the relative mean curvature. On the other hand, one can consider the critical points of the curvature functionals \(\int f(H,K)d\Omega\) with \(\Omega\) denoting the classical area element. It is proved that the two classes of surfaces coincide exactly in case of \(f(u,v)=|v|^{\alpha}\) \((\alpha\neq 0)\), characterizing a one parameter family of relative normal vector fields defined by the reviewer. In addition two characterizations of the Euclidean sphere by means of (Euclidean) curvature invariants are given.

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