No label defined (Q4532256)

In this paper the authors study the stability of space-like zero mean curvature surfaces in Lorentzian 4-spaces. Space-like zero mean curvature surfaces in Lorentzian spaces are critical points of the area functional. When the dimension of the Lorentzian ambient space is greater than three, neither the terms maximal nor minimal is appropriate to describe these surfaces, since they are neither local maxima nor local minima, even when the variations are taken to be sufficiently small. The term stationary is used for referring to space-like zero mean curvature surfaces. A space-like surface immersed into a Lorentzian 4-space \(M^4_1\) is said to have isotropic mean curvature if its mean curvature vector \(H\) is isotropic, \(\langle H,H\rangle \equiv 0\). The authors consider the global mean isotropic stability of stationary surfaces in the case where the ambient manifold is a flat space-time \(M^4_1 =R \times (R^3/\Lambda)\) or \(M^4_1 =S^1 \times (R^3/\Lambda)\) endowed with the Lorentzian metric \(\langle\;,\;\rangle = -dt^2+d\sigma^2\), where \(d\sigma^2\) is the standard metric on \(R^3/\Lambda\) and \(\Lambda\) is a lattice in \(R^3\). Identifying \(R^3/\Lambda\) with a slice \(t=\)constant, every minimal surface \(\chi: M \to R^3/\Lambda\) can be seen as a stationary surface in \(M^4_1\) via \(\psi: M \to M^4_1\) given by \(\psi (p) = (\text{constant}, \chi(p))\). The authors prove the following result. Let \(\chi: M \to R^3/\Lambda\) be a minimal immersion of a closed, oriented minimal surface in \( R^3/\Lambda\) and \(\psi: M \to M^4_1\) as above. Then \(\psi\) is mean isotropically stable if and only if index\((\chi) \leq 1\). For the entire collection see [Zbl 0980.00033].