Biharmonic hypersurfaces in pseudo-Riemannian space forms with at most two distinct principal curvatures (Q2198800)

The authors make a further investigation of Chen's conjecture for pseudo-Riemannian manifolds of constant curvature. The conjecture states that every biharmonic hypersurface of the pseudo-Euclidean space \(\mathbb{E}^{n+1}_s\) is minimal. They study biharmonic hypersurfaces with at most two distinct principal curvatures in pseudo-Riemannian space forms \(N^{n+1}_s(c)\), without the restriction that the shape operator is diagonalizable. It is shown that such biharmonic hypersurfaces have constant mean curvature. Furthermore, they find that such biharmonic hypersurfaces \(M^{2k-1}_r\) in the even-dimensional pseudo-Euclidean space \(\mathbb{E}^{2k}_s\), \(M^{2k-1}_{s-1}\) in the even-dimensional de Sitter space \(\mathbb{S}^{2k}_s(c)\), and \(M^{2k-1}_s\) in the even-dimensional anti-de Sitter space \(\mathbb{H}^{2k}_s(c)\) are minimal. A crucial technical result for the proof are certain canonical expressions of the shape operator of \(M^n_r\) in \(N^{n+1}_s(c)\), given in [\textit{B. O'Neill}, Semi-Riemannian geometry. With applications to relativity. Pure and Applied Mathematics, 103. New York-London etc.: Academic Press (1983; Zbl 0531.53051), Exercise 18, 260--261].