No label defined (Q4374437)

This paper studies the relation between submanifolds and the harmonicity of their Gauss maps in Minkowski space. More precisely, let \(H^n(-1)\) be an \(n\)-dimensional Riemannian manifold with sectional curvature \(-1\), and \(Q\) a generalized Grassmann manifold consisting of all \(m\)-dimensional totally geodesic subspaces in \(H^n(-1)\); Let \(L^{n+1}\) be Minkowski space and \(V=\Lambda^{m+1} L^{n+1}\). Let \(E=\{e_0, e_1, \dots, e_n\}\) be an orthonormal Lorentz frame, then by the map \(i:Q\to V\), \([E]\to e_0 \wedge e_1 \wedge \dots\wedge e_n\), we can regard \(Q\) as an algebraic submanifold in the unit sphere \(S^{N-1}\) in \(V\), where \(N=C^{n+1}_{m+1}\) is the dimension of \(V\). Suppose that \(\varphi: M^n \to H^n(-1)\) is an isometric immersion of a Riemannian manifold \(M^m\) into \(H^n (-1)\), and \(g: M^m\to Q\) is its Gauss map in the Obata sense, then \[ \overline g=i \cdot g:M^m \to S^{N-1} \subset V \] is called the generalized Gauss map. The main results of the paper are: (1) When \(m,p\geq 2\), the isometric immersion \(i:Q\to S^{N-1} \subset V\) is a minimal submanifold, whose squared length of the second fundamental form is constant. (2) The generalized Gauss map \(g:M^m \to S^{N-1} \subset V\) of the isometric immersion \(\varphi: M^m \to H^n(-1)\) is a harmonic map, if and only if \(\varphi (M^m)\) is a minimal submanifold with flat normal bundle.