Biharmonic hypersurfaces with three distinct principal curvatures in spheres

Abstract

We obtain a complete classification of proper biharmonic hypersurfaces with at most three distinct principal curvatures in sphere spaces with arbitrary dimension. Precisely, together with known results of Balmuş-Montaldo-Oniciuc, we prove that compact orientable proper biharmonic hypersurfaces with at most three distinct principal curvatures in sphere spaces $\mathbb S^{n+1}$ are either the hypersphere $\mathbb S^n(1/\sqrt2)$ or the Clifford hypersurface $\mathbb S^{n_1}(1/\sqrt2)\times\mathbb S^{n_2}(1/\sqrt2)$ with $n_1+n_2=n$ and $n_1\neq n_2$. Moreover, we also show that there does not exist proper biharmonic hypersurface with at most three distinct principal curvatures in hyperbolic spaces $\mathbb H^{n+1}$.

14 pages, accepted by Math. Nachr. on 10/24/2014