Extrinsic hyperspheres in manifolds with special holonomy (Q1940117)

An extrinsic hypersphere is a submanifold of codimension 1 of a Riemannian manifold which is totally umbilical and has a non-zero parallel mean curvature vector field. In this paper the authors study the existence of extrinsic hyperspheres in Riemannian manifolds with special holonomy, i.e., those ones whose restricted holonomy group is strictly contained in the special orthogonal group. First they prove the nonexistence of extrinsic hyperspheres in quaternion-Kähler manifolds of non-zero scalar curvature. Similarly they prove that there are no extrinsic hyperspheres in complete Riemannian products without 1-dimensional factors and in complete manifolds with holonomy \(G_2\) or \(\mathrm{Spin}(7)\). Their main observation in the proof is that a parallel form on the ambient manifold naturally defines a so-called special Killing form on any extrinsic hypersphere. Then they use the classification of special Killing forms, previously obtained by one of the authors. Finally, they study totally geodesic hypersurfaces in manifolds with special holonomy. The authors show that the problem of finding totally geodesic hypersurfaces in a locally reducible manifold reduces to the same problem for one of the locally defined factors. Then, they deal with the irreducible case. They prove that there do not exist any totally geodesic hypersurfaces in {\parindent=0.5cm\begin{itemize}\item[(1)] locally irreducible Kähler-Einstein manifolds (including Calabi-Yau and hyper-Kähler manifolds); \item[(2)] quaternion-Kähler manifolds; \item[(3)] manifolds with holonomy \(G_2\) or \(\mathrm{Spin}(7)\); \item[(4)] locally irreducible symmetric spaces of non-constant sectional curvature. \end{itemize}} In particular, the above results imply that a complete quaternion-Kähler manifold does not admit any (possibly non-complete) totally umbilical hypersurface.