\(L^2\)-harmonic 1-forms on submanifolds with finite total curvature (Q471998)

The abstract of the article starts as follows. ``Let \(x:M^m\rightarrow\bar{M}\), \(m\geq 3\), be an isometric immersion of a complete noncompact manifold \(M\) in a complete simply connected manifold \(\bar{M}\) with sectional curvature satisfying \(-k^2\leq K_{\bar{M}}\leq 0\), for some constant \(k\). Assume that the immersion has finite total curvature in the sense that the traceless second fundamental form has finite \(L^m\)-norm.'' The authors mainly prove three theorems. The first one states that if in the case \(K_{\bar{M}}\not\equiv 0\) the first eigenvalue of the Laplace-Beltrami operator of the Riemannian manifold \(M\) satisfies \[ \lambda_1(M)>\frac{(m-1)^2}{m}\left(k^2-\liminf_{r(p)\rightarrow\infty}|H(p)|^2\right), \] where \(r\) denotes the distance from a fixed point and \(H\) the mean curvature vector field, then the space of \(L^2\)-harmonic 1-forms on \(M\) has finite dimension. The second theorem states that if in the case \(K_{\bar{M}}\not\equiv 0\) it holds \[ \lambda_1(M)>\frac{(m-1)^2}{m}\left(k^2-\inf |H|^2\right), \] then there exists a positive constant \(\Lambda\) such that if \(\|\Phi\|_{L^m(M)}<\Lambda\), where \(\Phi\) denotes the traceless second fundamental form being defined by \(\Phi(X,Y)=\text{II}(X,Y)-\langle X,Y\rangle H\), then there is no nontrivial \(L^2\)-harmonic 1-form on \(M\). Furthermore, if \(k=0\), then \(\Lambda\) only depends on \(m\); otherwise it depends on \(m\), \(k\), \(\lambda_1(M)\), and \(\inf |H|\). The third theorem gives explicit estimates for the constant \(\Lambda\) in several cases.