On submanifolds with nonpositive extrinsic curvature (Q1318129)

Let \(x: M^ n \mapsto M^{n + p}\) be an isometric immersion of Riemannian manifolds. It is known that at the points where the extrinsic curvature \(K_ f\) vanishes, the index of relative nullity \(v\) is at least \(n - p\) and that the positiveness of \(v\) implies severe restrictions on the metric of the submanifold and on the structure of the immersion. In this paper the author obtains a similar bound for \(v\), in terms of the dimension and codimension of \(M^ n\), for the case of non-positive extrinsic curvature. He proves that at points where \(K_ f \leq 0\), then \(v \geq n - 2p\) and gives an example to show that the estimate is sharp. Then he uses the strong condition \(v \geq 0\) to obtain applications for submanifolds of the sphere, isometric immersions of Riemannian products and of Kähler manifolds. The proof of the main result is based on two propositions concerning symmetric bilinear maps with non-positive curvature. The first one (a generalization of a lemma of Otsuki) confirms the existence of an asymptotic subspace (for such a bilinear map) of suitable dimension and the second one relates the dimension of this subspace with \(v\).