Extrinsic curvatures of distributions of arbitrary codimension

Abstract

In this article, using the generalized Newton transformation, we define higher order mean curvatures of distributions of arbitrary codimension and we show that they agree with the ones from Brito and Naveira (Ann. Global Anal. Geom. 18, 371-383 (2000)). We also introduce higher order mean curvature vector fields and we compute their divergence for certain distributions and using this we obtain total extrinsic mean curvatures.