Isometric Immersions of Constant Mean Curvature and Triviality of the Normal Connection

Abstract

In a recent paper [2] Nomizu and Smyth have determined the hypersurfaces Mn of non-negative sectional curvature iso-metrically immersed in the Euclidean space Rn+1 or the sphere Sn+1 with constant mean curvature under the additional assumption that the scalar curvature of Mn is constant. This additional assumption is automatically satisfied if Mn is compact. In this paper we extend these results to codimension p isometric immersions. We determine the n-dimensional submanifolds Mn of non-negative sectional curvature isometrically immersed in the Euclidean Space Rn+P or the sphere Sn+P with constant mean curvature under the additional assumptions that Mn has constant scalar curvature and the curvature tensor of the connection in the normal bundle is zero. By constant mean curvature we mean that the mean curvature normal is paral lel with respect to the connection in the normal bundle. The assumption that Mn has constant scalar curvature is automatically satisfied if Mn is compact. The assumption on the normal connection is automatically sa tisfied if p = 2 and the mean curvature normal is not zero.