Surfaces with zero mean curvature vector in neutral 4-manifolds

Abstract

Space-like surfaces and time-like surfaces with zero mean curvature vector in oriented neutral 4-manifolds are isotropic and compatible with the orientations of the spaces if and only if their lifts to the space-like and the time-like twistor spaces respectively are horizontal. In neutral Kähler surfaces and paraKähler surfaces, complex curves and paracomplex curves respectively are such surfaces and characterized by one additional condition. In neutral 4-dimensional space forms, the holomorphic quartic differentials defined on such surfaces vanish. There exist time-like surfaces with zero mean curvature vector and zero holomorphic quartic differential which are not compatible with the orientations of the spaces and the conformal Gauss maps of time-like surfaces of Willmore type and their analogues give such surfaces.