Associated Families of Surfaces in Warped Products and Homogeneous Spaces

Abstract

We classify Riemannian surfaces admitting associated families in three dimensional homogeneous spaces with four-dimensional isometry groups and in a wide family of (semi-Riemannian) warped products, with an extra natural condition (namely, rotating structure vector field). We prove that, provided the surface is not totally umbilical, such families exist in both cases if, and only if, the ambient manifold is a product and the surface is minimal. In particular, there exists no associated families of surfaces with rotating structure vector field in the Heisenberg group.