Characterizations of immersed gradient almost Ricci solitons (Q2397670)

In this paper, the authors study gradient almost Ricci solitons \((M^n,g,f,\lambda)\) isometrically immersed into a Riemannian manifold \(\tilde{M}^{n+p}\), where \(f,\lambda\) are smooth functions on \(M\) and the following equation \[ \mathrm{ Ric}+\nabla^2f~=~\lambda g \tag{1} \] holds on \(M\). When the function \(\lambda\) is a constant, (1) is the well-known gradient Ricci soliton equation which plays an important role in the singularity study of the Ricci flow. The almost gradient Ricci solitons also attracted a lot of interest since they arise from the Ricci-Bourguignon flow. The main purpose of this paper is to classify the gradient almost Ricci solitons \((M^n, g, a^{\top},\lambda)\) isometrically immersed either in the hyperbolic space \(\mathbb{H}^{n+1}\), or in the de Sitter space \(\mathbb{S}_1^{n+1}\) or the anti-de Sitter space \(\mathbb{H}_1^{n+1}\), where \(a\) is a fixed nonzero vector whose tangential component \(a^{\top}\) defines the structure of a gradient almost Ricci soliton. The main result is that if the image of the Gauss mapping of \(M\) is totally umbilical, then the hypersurface \(M^n\) is totally umbilical. The authors can also conclude that such a hypersurface is isometric to either \(\mathbb{H}^n\) in \(\mathbb{H}^{n+1}, \mathbb{H}_1^{n+1}\) or \(\mathbb{S}^n\) in \(\mathbb{S}_1^{n+1}\) provided that the structure of the gradient almost Ricci soliton is nontrivial, i.e., the vector field \(a^{\top}\) is nontrivial. This can be viewed as generalization of the classical theorem due to [\textit{K. Nomizu} and \textit{B. Smyth}, Comment. Math. Helv. 44, 484--490 (1969; Zbl 0184.47004)] to gradient almost Ricci soliton in either \(\mathbb{H}^{n+1}\), or \(\mathbb{S}_1^{n+1}\) or \(\mathbb{H}_1^{n+1}\).