Elliptic sectors in surface theory and the Carathéodory-Loewner conjectures. (Q1609790)

Principal foliations on a smooth surface in \(\mathbb R^3\) and their singularities, that is the umbilics, have been an interesting topic of research in geometry. The well known conjecture of Carathéodory asserting that a smooth spherical surface \(f: S^2 \to \mathbb R^3\) of class \(C^3\) must have at least two umbilics (global version), or that any isolated umbilic must have index \(\leq 1\) (local version), remains as challenging today as it was when first made some 75 years ago. Recent advances include a result of \textit{B. Smyth} and \textit{F. Xavier} [Real solvability of the equation \(\partial^2_{\bar z}\omega = g \) and the topology of isolated umbilics, J. Geom. Anal. 8, No. 4, 655--671 (1998; Zbl 0983.53004)] to the effect that a principal foliation is never locally diffeomorphic to the standard dipole foliation under the Gauss map. In that paper the authors define a singular Hessian foliation in \(\mathbb R^2\) as a continuous 1-dimensional foliation \(\mathcal F\) of a neighborhood \(\Omega\) of \(o \in \mathbb R^2\) with an isolated singularity at \(o\) for which there exists a \(C^2\) real-valued function \(\omega\) on \(\Omega\) whose Hessian operator Hess\([\omega ]\) satisfies (1) Hess\([\omega ]\) is proportional to \(I\) only at \(o \in \Omega ;\) (2) \(\mathcal F_p\) is an eigenspace of the operator Hess\([\omega ]\) at each \(p \in \Omega /\{ o\}.\) As shown by these authors there is an equivalence between principal foliation on a surface and a Hessian foliation in the plane in the sense that given a function \(\omega : \Omega \to \mathbb R\) in a neighborhood of \(o \in \mathbb R^2 ,\) there exists an immersion \(f: \Omega \to \mathbb R^3\) such that the principal foliations of \(f\) coincide with the Hessian foliations of \(\omega .\) In the paper under review, the author's main result is that a \(C^2 \) singular Hessian foliation cannot have a biconvex lens. Loosely speaking, a biconvex lens of a foliation \(\mathcal F\) is bounded by an arc of \(\mathcal F\) and an arc of the orthogonal foliation \(\mathcal F^\perp\), both emanating from some nonsingular point \(z_0\) and meeting at a singular point \(o \in \mathbb R^2\) of the foliation such that the curvatures of these two arcs are nonnegative. The author further proves that a diffeomorphic image of the standard plane dipole foliation always has a biconvex lens and arrives at the following corollary of the main theorem: If \(p_0 \in S^2\) is a lone umbilic of an immersion \(f: S^2 \to \mathbb R^3\) of class \(C^4,\) then the principal foliations can never be \(C^2\)-diffeomorphic to the standard dipole foliation. Moreover, this result is even local.