English

Minimal isometric immersions of flat n-tori into spheres

Differential Geometry 2025-07-22 v2

Abstract

In 1985, Bryant stated that a flat 22-torus admits a minimal isometric immersion into some round sphere if and only if a certain rationality condition is satisfied. We show that the rationality criterion is no longer a necessary, but a sufficient condition for a flat nn-torus to admit minimal isometric immersions into spheres. We also derive an upper bound for the algebraic irrationality degree of such immersion. This bound is sharp and equals 4 if n=3n=3, and explicit embedded examples are provided respectively for each possible degree. A non-homogeneous example is also presented to show that the minimal isometric immersion of flat nn-tori is no longer necessarily homogeneous when n3n\geq 3. Moreover, we establish a deformation theorem that every flat n-torus admitting a minimal isometric spherical immersion can be isometrically, minimally and homogeneously immersed into a sphere of dimension at most n2+n1n^2+n-1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.13064,
  title  = {Minimal isometric immersions of flat n-tori into spheres},
  author = {Ying Lv and Peng Wang and Zhenxiao Xie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.13064},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

24 pages. Two new subsections (4.2 and 4.3) addressing the rigidity and homogeneity of irrational minimal flat 3-tori are added, and the upper bound for the algebraic irrationality degree of minimal flat n-tori has been improved by applying the Bezout theorem over non-algebraic closed field. Comments are welcome