English

Conformal geometry of marginally trapped surfaces in $\mathbb{S}^4_1$

Differential Geometry 2015-11-11 v2

Abstract

A spacelike surface SS14S\subset \mathbb{S}^4_1 is marginally trapped if its mean curvature vector is lightlike. On any oriented spacelike surface SS14S \subset \mathbb{S}^4_1 we show that a choice of orientation of the normal bundle ν(S)\nu(S) determines a smooth map G:SS3G: S \to \mathbb{S}^3 which we call the null Gauss map of SS. We show that if SS is marginally trapped then GG is a conformal immersion away the zeros of certain quadratic Hopf-differential of SS and so the surface G(S)G(S) is uniquely determined up to conformal transformations of S3\mathbb{S}^3 by two invariants: the normal Hopf differential κ\kappa and the Schwartzian derivative ss. We show that these invariants plus an additional quadratic differential δ\delta are related by a differential equation and determine the geometry of SS up to ambient isometries of S14\mathbb{S}^4_1. This allows us to obtain a characterization of marginally trapped surfaces SS whose null Gauss image is a constrained Willmore surface in S3\mathbb{S}^3 in the sense of C.Bohle, G. Peters and U.Pinkall [arXiv:math/0411479]. As an application of these results we construct and study integrable non-trivial one-parameter deformations of marginally trapped surfaces with non-zero parallel mean curvature vector and those with flat normal bundle.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1503.04309,
  title  = {Conformal geometry of marginally trapped surfaces in $\mathbb{S}^4_1$},
  author = {Eduardo Hulett},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.04309},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

23 pages. This a new improved version. Whole sections rewritten with corrected statements and proofs. References added. Comments are welcome