A spinorial characterization of hyperspheres (Q376613)

Let \(M\) be a compact orientable \(n\)-dimensional hypersurface, with nowhere vanishing mean curvature \(H\), immersed in a Riemannian spin manifold \(\overline M\) admitting a non-trivial parallel spinor field. It is well known that \(M\) inherits an induced spin structure and so we shall have also on \(M\) the spinor bundle and the Dirac operator \(D_M\). The restriction \({\mathbb{S}\llap{/\kern1pt}M}\) of the spinor bundle of the spin manifold \(\overline M\) to \(M\) and its Dirac-type operator \({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}\) can be compared with the intrinsic spinor bundle of the induced spin structure of \(M\) and its Dirac operator \(D_M\). A well-known result about eigenspinors of \({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}\) states that if \(\psi\) is a parallel spinor field on \(\overline M\), then its restriction \(\psi\in\Gamma({\mathbb{S}\llap{/\kern1pt}M})\) satisfies \({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}\psi=\frac n2H\psi\). If \(H\) is constant, then \(\frac n2H\) belongs to the spectrum of \({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}\), hence \(\lambda_1({D\llap{/\kern2pt}})\leq\frac n2|H|\). Let \(\mathbb{S}\llap{/\kern1pt}^HM\equiv {\mathbb{S}\llap{/\kern1pt}M}\) be the spin bundle corresponding to the conformal metric \(\left<\,,\right>^H=H^2\left<\,,\right>\) and the same spin structure, and let \({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}^H\) denote its associated Dirac operator. The authors show that if \(H>0\) (after a suitable choice of the unit normal) and if \(\psi^H\) is the spinor field \(H^{-\frac{n-1}2}\psi\in\Gamma({\mathbb{S}\llap{/\kern1pt}M})\), then \({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}^H\psi^H=\frac n2\psi^H\). As a consequence, \(\lambda_1({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}^H)\leq\frac n2\). In the fifth section the authors study hypersurfaces \(M\subset\overline M\) having \(\frac n2\) as a critical eigenvalue of \({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}^H\) and show the following result. Suppose that the scalar curvature \(\overline R\) of \(\overline M\) is non-negative and that \(H\) is positive (with respect to a suitable choice of the normal). If \(\frac n2=\lambda_k({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}^H)\) belongs to the spectrum of \({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}^H\) and is critical for all variations of the hypersurface \(M\), then \(\overline R\equiv 0\) on \(M\) and \(\nabla\psi=0\) for any spinor field \(\psi\) on \(M\) satisfying \({D\llap{/\kern2pt}}\psi=\frac n2H\psi\). The paper ends with two main results: Let \(M\subset{\mathbb R}^{n+1}\) be a compact Euclidean hypersurface with constant mean curvature \(H\), so that \(\pm\frac n2H\) are eigenvalues of \(D_M\). If the multiplicity of any of them satisfies \(\text{mult}_{D_M}(\pm\frac n2H)<2^{[\frac n2]+1}\), then one has exactly \(\text{mult}_{D_M}(\pm\frac n2H)=2^{[\frac n2]}\) for both of them and \(M\) must be a round hypersphere (Theorem 3). As a consequence, the authors prove in Theorem 4 that round hyperspheres are the only hypersurfaces of the Euclidean space satisfying the equality in the Bär inequality \[ \lambda_1(D_M)^2\leq\frac{n^2}{4\text{vol}(M)}\int_MH^2 dV. \] That is, the only compact constant mean curvature hypersurfaces of the Euclidean space immersed by first eigenspinors are hyperspheres.