María del Carmen Romero Fuster

We define the notions of (S _t ¹ × S _s ² )-nullcone Legendrian Gauss maps and S ₊ ² -nullcone Lagrangian Gauss maps on spacelike surfaces in anti de Sitter 4-space. We investigate the relationships between singularities of these maps and geometric properties of surfaces as an application of the theory of Legendrian/Lagrangian singularities. By using S ₊ ² -nullcone Lagrangian Gauss maps, we define the notion of S ₊ ² -nullcone Gauss-Kronecker curvatures and show a Gauss-Bonnet type theorem as a global property. We also introduce the notion of horospherical Gauss maps which have geometric properties different from those of the above Gauss maps. As a consequence, we can say that anti de Sitter space has much richer geometric properties than the other space forms such as Euclidean space, hyperbolic space, Lorentz-Minkowski space and de Sitter space.

We study some properties of space-like submanifolds in Minkowski n-space, whose points are all umbilic with respect to some normal field. As a consequence of these and some results contained in a paper by Asperti and Dajczer, we obtain that being ν-umbilic with respect to a parallel light-like normal field implies conformal flatness for submanifolds of dimension n − 2 ≥ 3. In the case of surfaces, we relate the umbilicity condition to that of total semi-umbilicity (degeneracy of the curvature ellipse at every point). Moreover, if the considered normal field is parallel, we show that it is everywhere time-like, space-like or light-like if and only if the surface is included in a hyperbolic 3-space, a de Sitter 3-space or a three-dimensional light cone, respectively. We also give characterizations of total semi-umbilicity for surfaces contained in hyperbolic 4-space, de Sitter 4-space and four-dimensional light cone.