Biconservative surfaces in BCV-spaces

Abstract

Biconservative hypersurfaces are hypersurfaces with conservative stress-energy tensor with respect to the bienergy functional, and form a geometrically interesting family which includes that of biharmonic hypersurfaces. In this paper we study biconservative surfaces in the 3-dimensional Bianchi-Cartan-Vranceanu spaces, obtaining their characterization in the following cases: when they form a constant angle with the Hopf vector field; when they are SO(2)-invariant.