The Darboux mapping of canal hypersurfaces (Q1267336)

Canal hypersurfaces are envelopes of families of hyperspheres. In a three-dimensional Euclidean space, canal surfaces were considered in many classical texts on differential geometry. Canal hypersurfaces in multidimensional Euclidean space were also investigated in many papers. Since the property of a hypersurface to be a canal hypersurface is conformally invariant, it is natural to consider the canal hypersurfaces in a conformal space \(C^\infty\). In the paper under review, the geometry of canal hypersurfaces of an \(n\)-dimensional conformal space \(C^n\) is studied. The main attention is given to the study of the Darboux maps of canal hypersurfaces in the de Sitter space \(M_1^{n+1}\) and the projective space \(P^{n+1}\). To canal hypersurfaces there correspond \(r\)-dimensional spacelike tangentially degenerate hypersurfaces of rank \(r\) in \(P^{n+1}\). In this connection the problem of existence of singular points on canal hypersurfaces is considered.