Volume Growth, Number of Ends, and the Topology of a Complete Submanifold

Abstract

Given a complete isometric immersion φ:Pm⟶Nn in an ambient Riemannian manifold Nn with a pole and with radial sectional curvatures bounded from above by the corresponding radial sectional curvatures of a radially symmetric space \(M^{n}_{w}\), we determine a set of conditions on the extrinsic curvatures of P that guarantee that the immersion is proper and that P has finite topology in line with the results reported in Bessa et al. (Commun. Anal. Geom. 15(4):725–732, 2007) and Bessa and Costa (Glasg. Math. J. 51:669–680, 2009). When the ambient manifold is a radially symmetric space, an inequality is shown between the (extrinsic) volume growth of a complete and minimal submanifold and its number of ends, which generalizes the classical inequality stated in Anderson (Preprint IHES, 1984) for complete and minimal submanifolds in ℝn. As a corollary we obtain the corresponding inequality between the (extrinsic) volume growth and the number of ends of a complete and minimal submanifold in hyperbolic space, together with Bernstein-type results for such submanifolds in Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces, in the manner of the work Kasue and Sugahara (Osaka J. Math. 24:679–704, 1987).