No label defined (Q4389664)

This is a comprehensive report on surfaces of constant mean curvature 1 (abbreviated as ``CMC-1'') in hyperbolic 3-space \(H^3(-1)\) up to 1995. The contents are as follows: 1. Minimal surfaces in Euclidean 3-space; 2. Surfaces of constant mean curvature 1 in the hyperbolic 3-space; 3. Lift of CMC-1 surfaces to \(\text{PSL} (2,\mathbb{C})\); 4. Duality and constructions of CMC-1 surfaces; 5. Final remarks. In Section 1, the Weierstrass representation for minimal surfaces in the Euclidean 3-space \(\mathbb{R}^3\) is reviewed, where Osserman's inequality for the total curvature of a complete minimal surface with finite total curvature in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) is introduced. In Section 2, some known results on CMC-1 surfaces in \(H^3(-1)\) are described, where the Weierstrass representation, the hyperbolic Gauss map and the inequality of the total curvature for CMC-1 surfaces in \(H^3(-1)\) are contained. In Section 3, the authors describe the lift of conformal CMC-1 immersions to \(\text{PSL} (2,\mathbb{C})= \text{SL} (2,\mathbb{C})/ \{\pm 1\}\). Let \(\overline M^2\) be a compact Riemann surface and \(\text{Met}_1 (\overline M^2)\) the set of conformal pseudometrics \(d\sigma^2\) of CMC-1 defined on \(\overline M^2\) excluding a finite number of points at which \(d\sigma^2\) has conical singularities. Then there is a one-to-one correspondence between the set of all branched CMC-1 immersions of \(\overline M^2 \setminus \{\text{finite set}\}\) and \(\text{Met}_1 (\overline M^2)\). In Section 4, the authors introduce some methods for constructing CMC-1 surfaces in \(H^3(-1)\). The first method is a construction from the Weierstrass data, which is most similar to the minimal surface case. The second method is a construction from the hyperbolic Gauss map and the Hopf differential, which can be used to construct irreducible CMC-1 surfaces with symmetric properties in \(H^3(-1)\). Many important and interesting papers on CMC-1 surfaces in \(H^3(-1)\) are listed in the references.