Virtual immersions and minimal hypersurfaces in compact symmetric spaces

We show that closed, immersed, minimal hypersurfaces in a compact symmetric space satisfy a lower bound on the index plus nullity, which depends linearly on their first Betti number. Moreover, if either the minimal hypersurface satisfies a certain genericity condition, or if the ambient space is a product of two CROSSes, we improve this to a lower bound on the index alone, which is affine in the first Betti number. To prove these, we introduce a generalization of isometric immersions in Euclidean space. Compact symmetric spaces admit (and in fact are characterized by) such a structure with skew-symmetric second fundamental form.