Uniqueness of isometric immersions with the same mean curvature (Q1731877)

The authors study immersions of the unit sphere \(S^{n}\) with a Riemannian metric \(g\) into the warped product space \(\left( N,ds^{2}\right) =\left( I\times S^{n},\frac{1}{f^{2}\left( r\right) }dr^{2}+r^{2}d\sigma\right) \), where \(I\subseteq\mathbb{R}^{+}\) is an interval, \(f\) is a positive function on \(I\) and \(\sigma\) denotes the standard metric on \(S^{n}\). Let \(\Phi=\frac{1}{2\rho}\left( ff_{\rho }+\frac{1-f^{2}}{2\rho}\right) \). Let \(i\) and \(\widetilde{i}\) be two immersions of \(\left( S^{n},g\right) \) into \(\left( N,ds^{2}\right) \) and let \(M=i\left( S^{n}\right) \), \(\widetilde{M}=\widetilde{i}\left( S^{n}\right) \,\)\ be the corresponding immersed surfaces. The main result states that if \(\Phi\geq0\) or \(\Phi\leq0\), \(f_{uu}+\left( n-1\right) \Phi f\leq0\), both \(M\) and \(\widetilde{M}\) have the same mean curvature and positive support function, then \(M\) and \(\widetilde{M}\) have equal second fundamental forms. In addition, if \(\Phi>\) or \(\Phi<0\), then \(M\) and \(\widetilde{M}\) only differ by a rotation in \(\left( N,ds^{2}\right) \). As a corollary, the authors derive the rigidity of immersions to spatial Schwarzschild and AdS-Schwarzschild manifolds and prove similar results if the mean curvature condition is replaced with an \(\sigma_{2}\)-curvature condition.