Recent Developments in Wintgen Inequality and Wintgen Ideal Submanifolds

Authors : Bang-yen CHEN

Pages : 6-45

Doi:10.36890/iejg.838446

View : 15 | Download : 5

Publication Date : 2021-04-15

Article Type : Review Paper

Abstract :P. Wintgen proved in [Sur l’inégalité de Chen-Willmore. C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris 288, 993–995 insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(1979);] that the Gauss curvature $G$ and the normal curvature $K^D$ of a surface in the Euclidean 4-space $E^4$ satisfy $$G+|K^D|\leq \Vert H\Vert ^2,$$ where $\Vert H\Vert ^2$ is the squared mean curvature. A surface $M^{2}$ in $E^4$ is called a {Wintgen ideal} surface if it satisfies the equality case of the inequality identically. Wintgen ideal surfaces in $E^4$ form an important family of surfaces; namely, surfaces with circular ellipse of curvature. In 1999, P. J. De Smet, F. Dillen, L. Verstraelen and L. Vrancken gave a conjecture for Wintgen inequality on Riemannian submanifolds in real space forms, which was well-known as the DDVV conjecture. Later, the DDVV conjecture was proven by Z. Lu and by Ge and Z. Tang independently. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on recent developments in Wintgen inequality and Wintgen ideal submanifolds.
Keywords : Gauss curvature, normal curvature, squared mean curvature, Wintgen surface, Wintgen ideal submanifold, DDVV conjecture