Ribaucour transformations for flat surfaces in the hyperbolic 3-space

Abstract

We consider Ribaucour transformations for flat surfaces in the hyperbolic 3-space, H3. We show that such transformations produce complete, embedded ends of horosphere type and curves of singularities which generically are cuspidal edges. Moreover, we prove that these ends and curves of singularities do not intersect. We apply Ribaucour transformations to rotational flat surfaces in H3 providing new families of explicitly given flat surfaces H3 which are determined by several parameters. For special choices of the parameters, we get surfaces that are periodic in one variable and surfaces with any even number or an infinite number of embedded ends of horosphere type.