Biharmonic PNMC submanifolds in spheres (Q363487)

A Riemannian immersion \(\phi: M \rightarrow N\) is said to have parallel normalized mean curvature vector fields (PNMC) if the mean curvature vector \(H\) is nowhere zero and \(\nabla^{\perp}(H/f)=0\), where \(f=|H|\) is the mean curvature function. We define an immersion \(\phi: M\rightarrow \mathbf E^{n}(c)\) into a real space form \(\mathbf E^{n}(c)\) to be biharmonic if its mean curvature vector field \(H\) satisfies \(\Delta^{\phi}H = mcH\), where \(\Delta^{\phi}\) is the rough Laplacian on sections of the pull-back bundle \(\phi^{-1}(T\mathbf E^{n}(c))\). So far, there are no known examples of proper biharmonic submanifolds in a space form \(\mathbf E^{n}(c)\) with \(c\leq 0\). In this paper, the authors provide equivalent conditions (cf. Theorem 3.1) for a biharmonic immersion into the \(n\)-dimensional unit Euclidean sphere \(S^n\) with PNMC. Biharmonic submanifolds in \(S^n\) with PNMC are classified and several examples of proper biharmonic submanifolds in \(S^n\) are provided. At the end of the paper, they prove that there is no PNMC biharmonic 3-type submanifolds in \(S^n\).