On the geometry of projective immersions (Q1117470)

The authors study geometry of projective immersions using results on affine immersions in previous papers of theirs [Math. Z. 195, 165-178 (1987; Zbl 0629.53012); Res. Math. 13, No.3/4, 338-362 (1988; Zbl 0657.53007)]. A projective structure P on a differentiable manifold M is defined by means of an atlas of local torsion-free affine connections any two of which are projectively related in the intersection of their domains. An immersion f of \((M,P)\) into \((\tilde M,\tilde P)\) is said to be projective if it is locally an affine immersion relative to a pair of local affine connections belonging to P and \(\tilde P.\) Consider only the case where the codimension is 1. The properties of being totally geodesic, nondegenerate, or umbilical are defined for projective immersions, as well as their fundamental forms and ranks. The first main result is concerned with a projective immersion of a flat projective structure \((M,P)\) into another flat projective structure \((\tilde M,\tilde P)\), which turns out to be umbilical if dim \(M\geq 3\) and the rank is \(\geq 2\). It is shown that an immersion of a connected compact differentiable manifold \(M^ n\), \(n\geq 2\), into the real projective space \(RP^{n+1}\) is totally geodesic if the rank is sufficiently low. Also, all connected, compact umbilical hypersurfaces in \(RP^{n+1}\) are determined. The second main result provides a projective extension of the well-known theorem of Pick-Berwald characterizing quadrics by vanishing of the cubic form in classical affine differential geometry. The third major result studies, for a nondegenerate hypersurface, how the affine normal, the Blaschke induced connection, the affine metric and the cubic form change when the ambient connection changes projectively. It is shown that the difference tensor between the Blaschke connection and the Levi-Civita connection for the affine metric remains invariant.