The associated family of an elliptic surface and applications to minimal submanifolds

Abstract

It is well-known that in any codimension a simply connected Euclidean minimal surface has an associated one-parameter family of minimal isometric deformations. In this paper, we show that this is just a special case of the associated family to any simply connected elliptic surface for which all curvature ellipses of a certain order are circles. We also provide the conditions under which this associated family is trivial, extending the known result for minimal surfaces. As an application, we show how the associated family of a minimal Euclidean submanifold of rank two is determined by the associated family of an elliptic surface clarifying the geometry around the associated family of these higher dimensional submanifolds.