Biharmonic hypersurfaces in space forms

Abstract

We prove that every biharmonic hypersurface in a space form of nonpositive sectional curvature is minimal in arbitrary dimension. This settles the hypersurface case of the generalized Chen's conjecture in hyperbolic space and gives a unified treatment of nonpositive space forms. For biharmonic hypersurfaces in the unit sphere, we derive quantitative restrictions on every possible nonconstant-mean-curvature solution. In particular, we obtain pointwise criteria forcing constant mean curvature, a strict scalar-curvature bound in dimensions at least five, and local classification results above the classical CMC gap threshold. These results provide further evidence for the BMO conjecture.

22 pages