Infinitesimal bendings of complete Euclidean hypersurfaces (Q1785567)

Let \(f:M^n\to\mathbb R^{n+1}\) be an isometric immersion of a Riemannian manifold \(M^n\) into Euclidean space \(\mathbb R^{n+1}\). An isometric bending of \(f\) is a smooth map \[ F:(-\epsilon,\epsilon)\times M^n\to\mathbb R^{n+1} \] such that \(F(0,\cdot)=f(\cdot)\) and \(F(t,\cdot)\) is an isometric immersion for each \(t\in(-\epsilon,\epsilon)\). As a weaker notion of isometric bending, a vector field \(\tau\in\Gamma(f^{\ast}T\mathbb R^{n+1})\) is called an infinitesimal bending if it satisfies \[ \langle\tilde{\nabla}_X\tau,f_{\ast}Y\rangle+ \langle\tilde{\nabla}_Y\tau,f_{\ast}X\rangle=0 \] for any vector fields \(X\), \(Y\) on \(M\), where \(\tilde{\nabla}\) denotes the connection of \(\mathbb R^{n+1}\). By the classification result due to Dajczer and Vlachos, it is known that there is an abundance of infinitesimally bendable hypersurfaces that are not isometrically bendable. In this paper, the author considers the case of complete hypersurfaces \(f:M^n\to\mathbb R^{n+1}\), \(n\geq 4\). If there is no open subset where \(f\) is either totally geodesic or a cylinder over an unbounded hypersurface of \(\mathbb R^4\), he proves that \(f\) is infinitesimally bendable only along ruled strips. In particular, if the hypersurface is simply connected, this implies that any infinitesimal bending of \(f\) is the variational field of an isometric bending.