Isometric immersions of domains of Lobachevsky spaces into spheres and Euclidean spaces, and a geometric interpretation of the spectral parameter (Q2501645)

In the theory of soliton equations the so-called spectral parameter plays an important role. For instance, starting from the spectral problem for the sine-Gordon equation, one gets pseudospherical surfaces and the Bianchi-Bäcklund transformations are reconstructed automatically. Studying evolutions of curves in a sphere \(S^n\), the radius of the ambient sphere turned out to be related to the spectral parameter (see \textit{A. Doliwa} and \textit{P. M. Santini} [J. Math. Phys. 36, No. 3, 1259--1273 (1995; Zbl 0827.58024)]). It is natural to conjecture that in some more general cases the spectral parameter is also related to the radius of an ambient sphere. In this paper a complete discussion of both problems is presented in the case of integrable systems associated with isometric immersions of Lobachevsky spaces into Euclidean spaces. It is shown that the Gauss-Weingarten equations for immersions of the \(n\)-dimensional Lobachevsky space into the sphere \(S^{2n-1}\) of radius \(R\) can be interpreted as the spectral problem for immersions of this space into the Euclidean space \(E^{2n-1}\). The spectral parameter \(\lambda\) is a function of the radius \(R\). A special class of constant negative curvature submanifolds is discussed immersed into \(S^{2n-1}\). This class is a generalization of the Clifford torus. For \(n\neq 2\) only submanifolds are obtained generated by a curve similar to the tractrix.