On the mean curvature of submanifolds with nullity

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate geometric conditions for isometric immersions with positive index of relative nullity to be cylinders. There is an abundance of noncylindrical n-dimensional minimal submanifolds with index of relative nullity $$n-2$$, fully described by Dajczer and Florit (Ill J Math 45:735–755, 2001) in terms of a certain class of elliptic surfaces. Opposed to this, we prove that nonminimal n-dimensional submanifolds in space forms of any codimension are locally cylinders provided that they carry a totally geodesic distribution of rank $$n-2\ge 2,$$ which is contained in the relative nullity distribution, such that the length of the mean curvature vector field is constant along each leaf. The case of dimension $$n=3$$ turns out to be special. We show that there exist elliptic three-dimensional submanifolds in spheres satisfying the above properties. In fact, we provide a parametrization of three-dimensional submanifolds as unit tangent bundles of minimal surfaces in the Euclidean space whose first curvature ellipse is nowhere a circle and its second one is everywhere a circle. Moreover, we provide several applications to submanifolds whose mean curvature vector field has constant length, a much weaker condition than being parallel.