A critical radius for unit Hopf vector fields on spheres
The volume of an unit vector field \(V\) of the sphere \(\mathbb S\) (\(n\) odd) is the volume of its image \(V(\mathbb S)\) in the unit tangent bundle. Unit vector fields that are tangent to the fibre of a Hopf fibration \(\mathbb S^n \to \mathbb CP^{\frac {n-1}{2}}\), are critical for the volume functional. Gluck and Ziller proved that these fields achieve the minimum of the volume if \(n=3\) and they opened the question of whether this result would be true for all odd dimensional spheres. It was shown to be wrong on spheres of radius one. Pedersen exhibited smooth vector fields on the unit sphere with less volume than Hopf vector fields for a dimension greater than five. The authors in this paper consider the situation for any odd dimensional spheres, but not necessarily of radius one. They show that the stability of the Hopf field actually depends on radius. Instability occurs if and only if \(r > \frac {1}{\sqrt {n-4}}\). The Hopf field cannot be minimal in this range. But for \(r\) small, the volume of vector fields built by Pedersen is greater than that of the Hopf field. In this case the Hopf vector field remains a candidate to be a minimizer. The authors study the asymptotic behaviour of the volume and for small \(r\) it is ruled by the first term of the Taylor expansion of the volume. It turns out that unit Hopf vector fields are absolute minima of that term. This fact, together with the stability result, gives positive arguments in favour of the Gluck and Ziller conjecture for small \(r\).
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