Chen's conjecture and epsilon-superbiharmonic submanifolds of Riemannian manifolds

TL;DR

This paper generalizes Chen's conjecture to a broad class of submanifolds in Riemannian manifolds, proving they are minimal under certain growth conditions, thus extending the understanding of harmonic mean curvature vectors.

Contribution

It introduces epsilon-superbiharmonic submanifolds and proves their minimality in complete Riemannian manifolds under growth conditions, broadening previous conjectures.

Findings

Epsilon-superbiharmonic submanifolds are minimal under growth conditions

Generalization of Chen's conjecture to Riemannian manifolds

Introduction of a new class of submanifolds with minimality property

Abstract

B.-Y. Chen famously conjectured that every submanifold of Euclidean space with harmonic mean curvature vector is minimal. In this note we establish a much more general statement for a large class of submanifolds satisfying a growth condition at infinity. We discuss in particular two popular competing natural interpretations of the conjecture when the Euclidean background space is replaced by an arbitrary Riemannian manifold. Introducing the notion of epsilon-superbiharmonic submanifolds, which contains each of the previous notions as special cases, we prove that epsilon-superbiharmonic submanifolds of a complete Riemannian manifold which satisfy a growth condition at infinity are minimal.