Biharmonic hypersurfaces in complete Riemannian manifolds (Q2391395)

Biharmonic submanifolds generalize minimal immersions, in the sense that they are isometric immersions minimizing the \(L^2\)-integral of the tension field that vanishes for minimal immersions. Chen's conjecture states that any biharmonic hypersurface (or even submanifold) in Euclidean space is automatically minimal. While this conjecture is still wide open, generalizations of it have been studied in the case when the surrounding space is a Riemannian manifold. Here, the authors consider biharmonic hypersurfaces in complete Riemannian manifolds. They give different sets of conditions under which such hypersurfaces must be minimal. In one of the theorems, the immersion must not meet the cut locus of some given point, and the target manifold has to satisfy some conditions on ``radial'' sectional curvatures and Ricci curvatures. A second set of conditions involves a nonnegative first eigenvalue of \(\Delta+\mathrm{Ric}^N(\nu,\nu)\) and \(H^2\)-integrability of the mean curvature; in this case the hypersurface is assumed to be complete. Yet another theorem formulates a kind of gap phenomenon for hypersurfaces of dimension \(m\geq3\) in a Cartan-Hadamard manifold, stating that the hypersurface is minimal if the \(L^m\)-norm of the mean curvature is small.