Characterizations of the Calabi product of hyperbolic affine hyperspheres (Q2519372)

There are three important affine connections for affine hypersurfaces, and they coincide if and only if the hypersurface is a quadric. The deviation from a quadric is measured in terms of the symmetric (1,2) difference tensor \(K\) between the connections. The next ``simple'' class is that of ``affine spheres'', but in contrast to the Euclidean case there are many subclasses of affine spheres, and one is far from a classification, even in low dimension. One needs strong additional assumptions for a classification of subclasses. In case that the affine spheres are locally strongly convex and have complete Blaschke metric, one knows the affine mean curvature \(H\) is positive if and only if the hypersphere is a hyperellipsoid; we have \(H=0\) if and only if the hypersphere is an elliptic paraboloid. But in the hyperbolic case \(H< 0\) there are many such hyperspheres, and this can be easily seen by the famous product construction for hyperbolic affine hyperspheres introduced by \textit{E. Calabi} [Sympos. Math. 10, 19--38 (1972; Zbl 0252.53008)]. A classification of this subclass is unknown so far. The authors of this interesting paper succeed to characterize Calabi's construction in terms of the difference tensor mentioned above. This result is applied to give a partial classification of affine hyperspheres with Levi-Civita-parallel cubic form (see the paper [\textit{Z. Hu, H. Li, U. Simon} and \textit{L. Vrancken}, Differ. Geom. Appl. 27, No. 2, 188--205 (2009; Zbl 1262.53008)].