Minimal surfaces in the product of two dimensional real space forms endowed with a neutral metric (Q2134235)

Let \(\mathbb{S}^{2} ,\mathbb{H}^{2} ,\) and \(d\mathbb{S}_{2}\) be, respectively, the unit 2-sphere, the upper sheet of the two-sheeted hyperboloid (a model of the hyperbolic plane), and the so-called De Sitter space (a well-known Lorentzian 2-dimensional space) endowed each with the metric \(g\) that is induced from the \(3\)-dimensional pseudo-Euclidean space \(\mathbb{R}_{p}^{3} .\) In this paper, the authors investigate minimal surfaces in the pseudo-Riemannian manifold \(\mathbb{S}_{p}^{2} \times \mathbb{S}_{p}^{2}\) endowed with the neutral metric \(G =\left (g , -g\right )\), where \(\mathbb{S}_{p}^{2}\) is one of following surfaces: \(\mathbb{S}^{2}\) if \(p =0\), \(\mathbb{H}^{2}\) if \(p =1\), or \(d\mathbb{S}_{2}\) if \(p =2.\) They determine all totally geodesic surfaces in \(\left (\mathbb{S}_{p}^{2} \times \mathbb{S}_{p}^{2} ,G\right )\) and give a relation between minimal surfaces in \(\left (\mathbb{S}_{p}^{2} \times \mathbb{S}_{p}^{2} ,G\right )\) and the solutions of the so-called Gordon equations. They also give, in some special cases, a topological classification of compact minimal surfaces in \(\left (\mathbb{S}_{p}^{2} \times \mathbb{S}_{p}^{2} ,G\right )\).