A fundamental theorem for hypersurfaces in semi-Riemannian warped products

Abstract

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a semi-Riemannian manifold of arbitrary signature to be locally isometrically immersed into certain warped products. Then, we describe a way to use the structure equations of such immersions to construct foliations of marginally trapped surfaces in a four-dimensional Lorentzian spacetimes. We point out that, sometimes, Gauss and Codazzi equations are not sufficient to ensure the existence of a local isometric immersion of a semi-Riemannian manifold as a hypersurface of another manifold. We finally give two low-dimensional examples to illustrate our results.