A Riemannian immersion or isometric immersion of Riemannian manifolds is an immersion of their underlying smooth manifolds which is also an isometry with respect to their Riemannian metrics.
Similarly, an isometric embedding is an isometric immersion which is also an embedding of smooth manifolds, hence of the underlying topological spaces.
The isometric immersion/embedding problem is to find isometric immersions/embeddings of Riemannian manifolds into large-dimensional but flat (Euclidean) spaces (e.g. Han & Hong 2006, Han & Lewicka 2023).
For the following purpose:
A (local) co-frame field on a smooth manifold is
such that on double intersections
the induced metric tensors agree:
(where we use the Einstein summation convention, throughout).
A pair of such local co-frames is regarded as equivalent if their induced metric tensors agree on the common refinement of their respective open covers.
Given a Riemannian manifold of dimension , then
an orthonormal local frame is an open cover equipped with a -tuple of vector fields
such that at each point we have that
is the canonical inner product on , hence in components
an orthonormal local co-frame is an open cover equipped with a -valued differential 1-form
such that at each point we have
Now given moreover an immersion into a Riemannian manifold
such an orthonormal local frame is called adapted or Darboux (generalizing terminology originating in the differential geometry of curves and surfaces, cf. Guggenheimer 1977, p. 210, Petrunin & Barrera 2020, p. 107) for if for each and each lift of its first components are tangent to :
(Sternberg 1964, Def. 2.1 on p. 244; Griffiths & Harris 1979 (1.12); Berger, Bryant & Griffiths 1983, p. 818; Yang 1992, p. 157)
such an orthonormal local co-frame is called adapted or Darboux (generalizing again the terminology from differential geometry of curves and surfaces, Cartan 1926, p. 211) for if its last -components are transversal to :
(Sternberg 1964, (2.11) on p. 246; Zandi 1988, p. 426; Mastrolia, Rigoli & Setti 2012, Def. 1.17; Giron 2020, §3.2.2; Chen & Giron 2021, §2.4)
The Darboux co-frame property (2) immediately implies that the pullback of the remaining frame components
constitute a local frame on . We may summarize this by saying that a local Darboux co-frame gives
(cf. Griffiths & Harris 1979 (1.13)).
Incidentally, this situation (3) of Darboux co-frames, when lifted/applied to the bosonic coframe components of super spacetimes, has later come to be known as the “embedding condition” in the “super-embedding approach” to super p-branes [Sorokin 2000 (4.36-37); Bandos 2011 (2.6-2.9); Bandos & Sorokin 2023 (5.13-14)], strenghtening the original “geometrodynamical condition” of Bandos et al. 1995 (2.23), which is just the first condition in (3).
Given an immersion into a Riemannian manifold, local Darboux (co-)frames always exist.
Given an immersion , consider any point . Since the immersion is locally an embedding (see here), there exists an open neighbourhood such that is the embedding of a submanifold. Therefore (by this Prop.) there exists an open neighbourhood of which serves as a coordinate chart for and a slice chart for in that it exhibits as a rectilinear hyperplane in .
Hence in this slice coordinate chart a local frame for is given by the canonical coordinate vector fields, with the first of them forming a local frame field on
From this local frame the Gram-Schmidt process produces an orthonormal frame, first for and then extended to :
This demonstrates the existence of orthonormal local frame fields (cf. Kayban 2021, Prop. 3.1).
To obtain the desired orthonormal local co-frame field we just dualize this local frame field:
By construction, the matrix of components of the above frame (given by ) is block diagonal (the upper diagonal block being the local frame on ).
This means (cf. e.g. here) that also the inverse matrix
is block diagonal, with its upper diagonal block being the inverse matrix of the original upper left block.
This gives the desired coframe field:
which is orthonormal on
because
and which is Darboux by the block-diagonal structure of .
(For the further generality of sequences of Darboux frames for suitable sequences of immersions, see Giron 2020 and Chen & Giron 2021, Thm. 2.2.)
In particular, an immersion of Riemannian manifolds is isometric iff around each point any of its Darboux coframe fields pull back to locally induce the given metric on .
Given a Riemannian manifold and an immersion, choose a Darboux co-frame field (which exists by Prop. ), hence so that
For brevity we will say that is
tangential if
transversal if .
Now let be the unique torsion-free connection for , in that
and denote the pullback of its tangential and transversal components, respectively, by
Then the pullback of the torsion constraint (4) is equivalent to thid pair of conditions on :
The first one just says that is the torsion-free connection with respect to the induced coframe on .
The second one says that the skew symmetric part vanishes, hence that
is symmetric in its tangential indices . This symmetric tensor on is called the second fundamental form of the immersion .
(e.g. Berger, Bryant & Griffiths 1983, p. 819; Chavel 1993 (II.2.12); Wang 2024, Def. 2.2; for alternative discussion not using co-frames see also Chavel 1993 §II.2; Lee 2018, pp. 225)
Élie Cartan (translated by Vladislav Goldberg from Cartan’s lectures at the Sorbonne in 1926–27): Part E of: Riemannian Geometry in an Orthogonal Frame, World Scientific (2001) [doi:10.1142/4808, pdf]
Shlomo Sternberg, Lectures on differential geometry, Prentice-Hall (1964), AMS (1983) [ISBNJ:978-0-8218-1385-0, ams:chel-316, ark:/13960/t1pg9dv6k]
Heinrich W. Guggenheimer, Differential Geometry, Dover (1977) [isbn:9780486634333, ark:/13960/t9t22sk9n]
Phillip Griffiths, Joseph Harris, Algebraic geometry and local differential geometry, Annales scientifiques de l’École Normale Supérieure, Serie 4, Volume 12 no. 3 (1979) 355-452 [numdam:ASENS_1979_4_12_3_355_0]
Eric Berger, Robert Bryant, Phillip Griffiths, The Gauss equations and rigidity of isometric embeddings, Duke Math. J. 50 3 (1983) 803-892 [doi:10.1215/S0012-7094-83-05039-1]
Ahmad Zandi, Minimal immersions of surfaces in quaternionic projective space, Tsukuba Journal of Mathematics 12 2 (1988) 423-440 [jstor:43686661]
Kichoon Yang, Embeddings of -Structures, chapter VII in: Exterior Differential Systems and Equivalence Problems, Mathematics and its Applications 73, Kluwer (1992), Spinger (1992) [doi:10.1007/978-94-015-8068-7_7]
Isaac Chavel, Riemannian Submanifolds, §II.2 in: Riemannian geometry – A modern introduction, Cambridge University Press (1993) [doi:10.1017/CBO9780511616822]
Qing Han, Jia-Xing Hong: Isometric Embedding of Riemannian Manifolds in Euclidean Spaces, Mathematical Surveys and Monographs 130, AMS (2006) [ISBN:0821840711]
Paolo Mastrolia, Marco Rigoli, Alberto G. Setti, §1.3 Some formulas for immersed submanifolds in: Yamabe-type Equations on Complete, Noncompact Manifolds, Birkhäuser (2012) [doi:10.1007/978-3-0348-0376-2]
Tristan Pierre Giron, On the Analysis of Isometric Immersions of Riemannian Manifolds, PhD thesis (2020) [uuid:cae2f41d-c5a1-4138-9dec-5e824d21044e, pdf]
Gui-Qiang G. Chen, Tristan P. Giron, Weak continuity of curvature for connections in [arXiv:2108.13529]
Nicholas Kayban, Riemannian Immersions and Submersions (2021) [pdf, pdf]
Qing Han, Marta Lewicka, Isometric immersions and applications, Notices of the AMS 2023 [arXiv:2310.02566]
Zuoqin Wang, The method of moving frames, Lecture 11 in: Riemannian geometry (2024) [webpage, pdf, pdf]
Last revised on May 22, 2024 at 19:56:26. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.