Harmonic sections of normal bundles for submanifolds and their stability (Q811827)

Special cases of harmonic sections of normal (sphere) bundles for submanifolds are discussed. Harmonic sections are stationary for some natural energy derived from the metric of the manifold and the bundle metric. After some general facts are explained for such sections, attention is focused to stability of harmonic sections in a special situation: Let \(M\) be an \(n\)-dimensional compact connected orientable submanifold in \(S^{n+k}\) with \(k\geq4\), and \(\xi\) be a harmonic section of the normal bundle \(T^\bot M\). Under certain restrictions on \(\xi\) it can be shown that \(\xi\) must be parallel if it is weakly stable, resulting in \(M\) being a hypersurface in some \(S^{n+1}\) with unit normal vector field \(\xi\). The proof exploits the second variation formula.