English

Conformally flat submanifolds in spheres and integrable systems

Differential Geometry 2009-09-29 v2 Exactly Solvable and Integrable Systems

Abstract

E. Cartan proved that conformally flat hypersurfaces in S^{n+1} for n>3 have at most two distinct principal curvatures and locally envelop a one-parameter family of (n-1)-spheres. We prove that the Gauss-Codazzi equation for conformally flat hypersurfaces in S^4 is a soliton equation, and use a dressing action from soliton theory to construct geometric Ribaucour transforms of these hypersurfaces. We describe the moduli of these hypersurfaces in S^4 and their loop group symmetries. We also generalise these results to conformally flat n-immersions in (2n-2)-spheres with flat normal bundle and constant multiplicities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0803.2754,
  title  = {Conformally flat submanifolds in spheres and integrable systems},
  author = {Neil Donaldson and Chuu-Lian Terng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0803.2754},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

24 pages, 1 figure. Minor changes

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:22:40.899Z