Complete biconservative surfaces in the hyperbolic space \(\mathbb{H}^3\) (Q2188505)

A submanifold \(\varphi:M^m\to (N^n,h)\) is called biconservative, if the tangent part of the bitension field \[ \tau_2(\varphi)=-\Delta^\varphi\tau(\varphi)-\operatorname{trace}_{g}R^N(d\varphi,\tau(\varphi))d\varphi \] vanishes everywhere, where \(g\) is the induced metric on \(M\). Thus, biconservative submanifolds are generalizations of the biharmonic submanifolds which are characterized by the vanishing of \(\tau_2(\varphi)\). Restricting to surfaces in a 3-dimensional space form \(N^3(c)\) of constant section curvature \(c\), the condition of biconservative is equivalent to \[ A(\operatorname{grad} f)=-\frac f2\operatorname{grad} f,\tag{1} \] where \(A\) is the shape operator of the surface \(M\) and \(f=\operatorname{trace}A\) is its mean curvature function. Biconservative surfaces in Euclidean space have been very well studied. Note that Equation (1) implies that CMC surfaces (\(\operatorname{grad}f\equiv 0\)) are trivial examples of biconservative surfaces. In this paper, the authors construct simply connected, complete, non-CMC biconservative surfaces in 3-dimensional hyperbolic space \(\mathbb{H}^3\) in both intrinsic and extrinsic way. The construction is via a gluing process and there are three families of such surfaces. The intrinsic approach is contained in Section 3. The authors first construct a simply connected, complete abstract surface gluing two abstract standard biconservative surfaces and show that it admits a unique biconservative immersion in \(\mathbb{H}^3\). The main existence and uniqueness result of this section is Theorem 3.11. In Section 4, the authors work extrinsically and reobtain the result in Theorem 3.11. The construction is again a gluing process.