A Möbius scalar curvature rigidity on compact conformally flat hypersurfaces in \(\mathbb{S}^{n + 1}\) (Q1645163)

Let \(\phi:M \to N\) be an immersion of an \(n\)-dimensional manifold \(M\) as a hypersurface in the \((n+1)\)-dimensional manifold \(N\). Suppose \(N\) is equipped with a conformal class \([h]\) of Riemannian metrics. The trace-free part of the second fundamental form associated with a normal unimodular with respect to a representative metric \(h \in [h]\) depends on the choice of \(h\) only up to scale, and its squared-norm \(\rho^{2}\) with respect to \(h\) scales inversely to \(h\), so that \(\rho^{2}h\) does not depend on the choice of \(h \in [h]\). Since \(\rho\) is nonvanishing if and only if the immersion has no umbilic points, in this case \(g = \phi^{\ast}(\rho^{2}h)\) is a metric on \(M\), depending only on the immersion and \([h]\), called the Möbius metric. The paper under review studies hypersurfaces in the round \((n+1)\)-dimensional sphere that are conformally flat in the induced metric and have no umbilic points. Two theorems are proved. The first shows that if \(n \geq 4\) and the scalar curvature of the Möbius metric of such a hypersurface is equal to a constant \(R\), then the hypersurface is equivalent via a Möbius transformation to the image of a cylinder, cone, or rotational hypersurface over certain curves in \(\mathbb{S}^{2}\), \(\mathbb{R}^{2}\), or the two-dimensional upper half-space, respectively, that the authors call \textit{curvature spirals}. With respect to arclength \(s\), the geodesic curvature \(k(s)\) of such a curves solves the second-order differential equation \[ -\frac{k_{ss}}{k^{3}} + \frac{(n+2)k_{s}^{2}}{2k^{4}} + \epsilon \frac{n-2}{2k^{2}} = R, \] where \(\epsilon = 1, 0, -1\), respectively. The second theorem shows that with the same hypothesis, if \(M\) is additionally compact, then \(R = (n-1)(n-2)r^{2}\) for \(0 < r < 1\) and is Möbius equivalent to the standard embedding of the torus \[ \mathbb{S}^{1}(\sqrt{1 - r^{2}}) \times \mathbb{S}^{n-1}(r) \to \mathbb{S}^{n+1}. \] The restriction to \(n \geq 4\) is needed because the proofs use the theorem of Cartan-Schouten that, when \(n \geq 4\), an immersed hypersurface in \(\mathbb{S}^{n+1}\) is conformally flat if and only if at least \(n-1\) of its principal curvatures are equal. Both theorems proved in the paper remain true when \(n = 3\) if the assumption of conformally flatness is replaced by the assumption the immersion has at most two distinct principal curvatures.