The Gauss Section of a Riemannian Immersion
The Gauss Section of a Riemannian Immersion
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黎曼浸没的高斯部分
DOI:
10.1112/jlms/s2-33.1.157
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发表时间:
1986
影响因子:
1.2
通讯作者:
C. Wood
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
C. Wood
Riemannian manifolds [3] in the context of sections of Riemannian fibre bundles. This is then used to investigate the geometry of an isometrically immersed Riemannian submanifold.In § 1 we introduce the vertical energy functional and calculate its first variation (Theorem 1). In contrast to the case of harmonic maps is the appearance of a torsion tensor, which may be seen as a consequence of the asymmetry implicit in the definition of vertical energy. To obtain nice Euler-Lagrange equations (Theorem 2), it therefore suffices to restrict attention to those variations with the corresponding asymmetry—the vertical variations. We have chosen the phrase harmonic section to describe such critical points, although in general these will not be harmonic maps. In § 2 our aim is to bring together results of Obata [6] and Ruh and Vilms [7], who studied isometrically immersed submanifolds of Euclidean space (or, more generally [6], constantly-curved space). Such immersions give rise to a Gauss map into an appropriate Grassmann manifold, and the conformality and harmonicity of the Gauss map were shown (in [6, 7], respectively) to correspond to conditions on the curvature of the immersion. In order to remove the limitation of constant curvature in the ambient space, we consider instead the Gauss lift to an appropriate Grassmann bundle. The conditions we derive for its vertical conformality and vertical harmonicity (Theorems 4-7) may be seen as manifestations of the equations of Gauss and Codazzi, respectively. Equivalently, they rhay be viewed as the tangential and normal components of a certain Weitzenbock formula, in which the term of apparently least geometrical significance (the so-called rough Laplacian) provides the link between the immersion and its Gauss lift. It is hoped that this approach may help to throw light on other types of Riemannian (/-structures, examples of which appear in [10, 11]. I should like to take this opportunity to thank Professor James Eells for suggesting these, and many other ideas, as possible topics for inclusion in a Ph. D. Thesis [9]. For details of recent work concerning the Gauss lift of a conformally immersed surface, we refer the interested reader to his survey article [2].