Cubic form geometry for immersions in centro-affine and graph hypersurfaces (Q1412972)

This paper contains a series of interesting results concerning cubic forms of hypersurfaces in different geometries. It is well known that the vanishing of the cubic form in the unimodular-affine hypersurface theory characterizes quadrics, while in arbitrary relative geometries the vanishing of the traceless part of the cubic form gives an analogous characterization. Recently \textit{T. Lusala} studied nondegenerate surfaces in the 3-sphere; he considered the three fundamental forms I, II, III and the associated Levi-Civita connections \(\nabla(\text{I})\),\(\nabla(\text{II})\), \(\nabla(\text{III})\). A totally symmetric cubic form is defined by \(C(X,Y,Z):= (\nabla(\text{I})\text{II})(X,Y,Z)\). In other geometric situations analogous or more general definitions give totally symmetric cubic forms. Generalizing a result of \textit{T. Lusala} [Beitr. Algebra Geom. 43, No. 1, 275--296 (2002; Zbl 1010.53016)], the authors prove theorems of the following type: Let \(\widetilde C\) be the traceless part of the cubic form for an \(n\)-dimensional nondegenerate hypersurface in a unit-sphere, centered at the origin. Then \(\widetilde C\equiv 0\) characterizes intersections of \(S^{n+1}\) with nondegenerate quadratic cones centered at the origin.