Characterization of manifolds of constant curvature by spherical curves (Q2297629)

The main aim of the paper is to investigate a new characterization of space forms (Riemannian manifolds with constant sectional curvature) by considering regular curves on geodesic spheres with small enough radius. The authors use rotation minimizing (RM) vector fields along a regular curve on Riemannian manifolds (which is initially introduced by Bishop on Euclidean spaces) as the basic tools and derive a characterization of totally umbilical hypersurfaces as well as a characterization of space forms via total umbilicity of geodesic spheres. They derive some analogous results on three-dimensional space forms (using the total torsion along curves) and on semi-Riemannian manifolds.