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Constant mean curvature spheres in ${\rm Sol}_3$
- American Journal of Mathematics
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 135, Number 3, June 2013
- pp. 763-775
- 10.1353/ajm.2013.0025
- Article
- Additional Information
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Based on work of Daniel and Mira, we prove that for each $H>0$, there exists
a unique (up to ambient isometry) immersed constant mean curvature $H$ sphere $S_H$ in
${\rm Sol}_3$, where ${\rm Sol}_3$ is the non-abelian solvable 3-dimensional Lie group equipped with
its usual left-invariant metric that makes it into a model space for one of the eight
Thurston geometries; see Bonahon or Scott for a discussion of
the Thurston geometries that can occur for compact 3-manifolds. Since this proof also
demonstrates that $S_H$ has index one, the results in~Daniel-Mira imply $S_H$ is embedded
and the left-invariant Gauss map of $S_H$ is a diffeomorphism. One key new result that
we prove in order to obtain these results for constant mean curvature spheres is the
existence of height estimates for certain constant mean curvature $H$ graphs in ${\rm Sol}_3$,
which depend only on any fixed positive lower bound for $H$. By the work in~Daniel-Mira,
the existence of the spheres $S_H$ for all $H>0$ implies the existence for all $H\geq 0$
of a complex (holomorphic only when $H=0$) quadratic differential $Q_H$ defined on all
constant mean curvature $H$ surfaces $M$ in ${\rm Sol}_3$ and which, for $H>0$, vanishes on
an open set of $M$ if and only if $M$ is contained in some left translation of $S_H$;
furthermore, when $Q_H$ is not identically zero on $M$, it has isolated zeros on $M$
and negative index at these zeros.