On submanifolds whose tubular hypersurfaces have constant higher order mean curvatures (Q265924)

It was found out by \textit{É. Cartan} [Ann. Mat. Pura Appl. (4) 17, 177--191 (1938; JFM 64.1361.02)] that a hypersurface \(M\) in a real space form has constant principal curvatures if and only if its nearby parallel hypersurfaces have constant mean curvatures. Also, it was shown that the second statement is equivalent to the fact that \(M\) is isoparametric, i.e., \(M\) is locally a level set of a function \(f\) with the property that both \(||\nabla f||^2\) and \(\triangle f\) are constant on the level set of \(f\). In this paper, the authors have extended this result: A hypersurface \(M\) in a real space form has constant principal curvatures if and only if for some \(k \geq 1\), its nearby parallel hypersurfaces have constant \(k\)-th order mean curvatures \(Q_{k}=\mathrm{tr}((S_{\nu})^{k})\). They also show that a curvature-adapted hypersurface \(M\) in a locally rank-one symmetric space has constant principal curvatures if and only if its nearby parallel hypersurfaces have constant \(k\)-th order mean curvatures. Furthermore, they provide generalized results of E. Cartan, K. Nomizu, H. F. Münzner, and Q. M. Wang on the isoparametric theory along with results on focal submanifolds of isoparametric functions on a complete Riemannian manifold.