Uniqueness of isometric immersions with the same mean curvature

Abstract

Motivated by the quasi-local mass problem in general relativity, we study the rigidity of isometric immersions with the same mean curvature into a warped product space. As a corollary of our main result, two star-shaped hypersurfaces in a spatial Schwarzschild or AdS-Schwarzschild manifold with nonzero mass differ only by a rotation if they are isometric and have the same mean curvature. We also give similar results if the mean curvature condition is replaced by an $\sigma_2$-curvature condition.