Surfaces of orthonormal frame bundle with Wagner lift metric (Q2140899)

For a 2-dimensional oriented Riemannian manifold \((M, g)\), the authors consider the 3-dimensional Riemannian manifold \((\mathrm{SO}(M, g), \hat{g})\), the positive orthonormal frame bundle over \((M, g)\) endowed by the Wagner lift metric \(\hat{g}\). They study the horizontal surfaces in \(\mathrm{SO}(M, g)\) which are the sections of the bundle \(\mathrm{SO}(M, g) \rightarrow M\), and the vertical surfaces which are the preimages of regular curves in \(M\). The authors obtain the first and second form of the horizontal and vertical surfaces, and the mean curvature of these surfaces. As an interesting application of these results they establish conditions for the existence of both, minimal and constant mean curvature surfaces in \((\mathrm{SO}(M, g), \hat{g})\). The paper is organized into four sections dealing with the following aspects: introduction, preliminaries (the orthonormal frame bundle, definition of the Wagner lift of metric, relation between basic geometrical objects of \((M, g)\) and \((\mathrm{SO}(M, g), \hat{g})\), geometry of a vector field on a surface by A. P. Norden), geometry of horizontal surfaces (second fundamental form of a horizontal surface, calculus in special coordinates, infinitesimal isometries and mean curvature), geometry of vertical surfaces.