Minimal centroaffine immersions of codimension two (Q5920719)

The authors consider centroaffine immersions \(x: M\to A^{n+2}\) of codimension 2 with \(x(p)\neq dx(T_pM)\,\forall p\in M\) and \(x(M)\) not contained in a hyperplane of \(A^{n+2}\). The centroaffine metric \(g\) of \(x\), given by \(g_{ij}:= |\text{det}(G_{ij})|^{{-1\over n+2}}G_{ij}\) with \(G_{ij}:= \text{det}(x_1,\dots, x_n, x,x_{ij})\) \((i,j= 1,\dots, n)\), is supposed to be nondegenerate. Then \(\{x,\Delta_g x\}\) may be used as centroaffine normalization of \(x\) whence a suitable definition for the centroaffine mean curvature \(H\) follows. Now the first variation of the immersion \(x\) only relates to the \(\Delta_gx\)-component of the variational vector field, and the centroaffine minimal submanifold is the submanifold with vanishing \(H\). As main result also the second variational formula of the volume integral is computed for an allowable interior deformation of a centroaffine minimal submanifold. Some explicit examples axe added.