On Cartan's conformally deformable hypersurfaces. (Q5954547)

The authors classify conformally deformable hypersurfaces of dimension \(n\geq 5\) in Euclidean space. Such hypersurfaces were classified by E.\ Cartan in 1917, who gave a parametric description of them. Here the authors give the following simple geometric construction, which produces essentially all examples. Take a flat codimension 2 Riemannian submanifold \(N^{n+1} \subset \mathbb{M}^{n+3}\) of the Minkowski space \(\mathbb{M}^{n+3}\) which intersects the null cone \(\mathbb{V}^{n+2}\subset \mathbb{M}^{n+3}\) transversally. Locally, we can identify \(N^{n+1}\) with an open subset \(U \subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}\). The intersection \(M^n = N^{n+1}\cap \mathbb{V}^{n+2} \subset N^{n+1} \cong U \subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}\) is then identified with a hypersurface in \(\mathbb{R}^{n+1}\). Under suitable assumptions on the isometric embedding \(N^{n+1} \subset \mathbb{M}^{n+3}\) one can construct a conformal embedding of \(M^n\) into \(\mathbb{R}^{n+1}\) which is not congruent to the inclusion \(M^n \subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}\). In fact, let \(\mathbb{E}^{n+1} \subset \mathbb{V}^{n+2}\) be a standard embedded Euclidean \((n+1)\)-space, the intersection of \(\mathbb{V}^{n+2}\) with an appropriate affine hyperplan, such that \(M^n\) is in general position with respect to \(\mathbb{E}^{n+1}\). Then one can project \(M^n\) along the radial lines of the null cone into \(\mathbb{E}^{n+1} \cong \mathbb{R}^{n+1}\), which produces a hypersurface \(\widetilde{M}^n \subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}\) which is conformally isomorphic to \(M^n\) but in general not conformally congruent to \(M^n \subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}\).