Principal curvatures and parallel surfaces of wave fronts (Q2334551)

This paper is devoted to the study of the geometry of singular surfaces, in particular of wave fronts. The author defines principal curvatures for wave fronts with any type of singularity and characterizes the boundedness of one of these curvatures (the other is unbounded) in terms of other well-known geometric invariants such as the limiting normal curvature and the (normalized) cuspidal curvature. He defines a principal vector along the singular set and characterizes (for cuspidal edges) when this set is a line of curvature in terms of another invariant, the cusp-directional torsion. These results are then applied in two different contexts. The first is parallel surfaces, for which generic and some one-parameter family singularities of wave fronts are characterized in terms of ridge points and other objects related to the bounded principal curvature. Here, an interesting result on constant principal curvature lines is obtained. The second is extended distance squared functions, where \(D_4\)-singularities of the functions are characterized in terms of ridge points too.