Submanifold theory. Beyond an introduction (Q2420011)

This book contains seventeen chapters and deals with the geometry of submanifolds and particularly with the general properties of isometric and conformal immersions of Riemannian manifolds into space forms. Each chapter ends with a historical note that presents the evolution of the research on the developed topics, and a serie of exercices. The first chapter establishes some basic facts of the theory of submanifolds that are used throughout the rest of the book. The second fundamental form and normal connection of an isometric immersion are introduced by means of the Gauss and Weigarten formulas, and their compatibility equations are derived, namely, the Gauss, Codazzi and Ricci equations. The second chapter focuses on conditions under which the codimension of an isometric immersion of a Riemannian manifold into a space form can be reduced, that is, conditions under which the image of the isometric immersion is contained in a totally geodesic submanifold of the ambient space. In Chapter 3, some general aspects of the theory of minimal submanifolds are introduced, starting with a proof of the first variational formula. Chapter 4 deals with the study of isometric rigidity/deformation problem for submanifolds of space forms. In Chapter 5, the theory of flat bilinear forms is applied to the study of isometric immersions of space forms into space forms. Chapter 6 deals with the geometric restrictions on the submanifolds with nonpositive extrinsic curvatures of space forms. In Chapter 7 the authors study complete submanifolds of low codimension of space forms with positive index of relative nullity everywhere. Chapter 8 introduces the notion of extrinsic products of immersions, which is the simplest way of constructing an isometric immersion of a product manifold into a space form. In Chapter 9 the authors study conformal immersions. In Chapter 10, two other useful ways of constructing immersions of product manifolds from immersions of the factors are discussed, namely, (extrinsic) warped products of immersions and, more generally, partial tubes over extrinsic of immersions. The purpose of Chapter 11 is to provide a proof of the parametric description of hypersurfaces of space forms that admit nontrivial isometric deformations. Chapter 12 deals with one of the central concepts of the book, namely, that of a genuine deformation. The results of Chapter 13 are global in nature and show that complete Euclidean submanifolds with low codimension can be isometrically deformed only in very special ways. Chapter 14 discusses a linearised version of the notion of an isometric bending of a submanifold, that is, of a continuous isometric deformation, namely, the notion of infinitesimal bending. In Chapter 15 the authors present several general results on isometric immersions of Kähler manifolds into space forms. Chapter 16 is devoted to conformally flat submanifolds in Euclidean space with low codimension. In the last chapter the authors present some classification results on Euclidean hypersurfaces \(M^n\) of dimension \(n\geq 5\) that admit nontrivial conformal deformations. The authors end with an appendix on the theory of vector bundles that recall the fundamentals on vector bundles that are used throughtout the book.