On the complete spacelike hypersurfaces immersed with two distinct principal curvatures in a locally symmetric Lorentz space (Q314638)

The study of the geometry of space-like hypersurfaces immersed in Lorentz manifolds has attracted the attention of geometers over the last few decades. A primary source of motivations to study such submanifolds has been the connection with problems from mathematical physics where space-like submanifolds of de Sitter and anti de Sitter spacetimes play a central role. From a differential geometric viewpoint, space-like hypersurfaces of Lorentzian ambients are interesting due to the fact that they exhibit nice Bernstein-type properties. The paper under review considers the study of complete space-like Weingarten hypersurfaces immersed with two distinct principal curvatures in a locally symmetric Lorentzian ambient manifold. Under appropriate constraints on the values of the mean curvature and on the norm of the traceless part of the second fundamental form of such hypersurfaces, the authors extend the techniques developed in recent previous papers to characterize such space-like hypersurfaces as being (isometric to) isoparametric hypersurfaces of the mentioned locally symmetric Lorentzian ambient space. The ideas used to obtain the main results of the paper and their corollaries are based mainly on the use of a Simons-type formula jointly with the application of certain generalized maximum principles to a suitable modified Cheng-Yau operator.