Uniqueness of the Bonnet problem in Thurston geometries

Abstract

We study the Bonnet problem in Bianchi--Cartan--Vr\u{a}nceanu spaces and in $\mathrm{Sol}_3$. Our main contribution is to establish the uniqueness of Bonnet mates, which leads us to address the problem of determining when an isometric immersion can be continuously deformed through isometric immersions that preserve the principal curvatures -- a question originally posed in $\mathbb{R}^3$ by Chern~\cite{Chern}. For Bianchi--Cartan--Vr\u{a}nceanu spaces, we complete the local classification of Bonnet pairs by studying the uniqueness of the results obtained by G\'alvez, Mart\'inez and Mira~\cite{GMM}, and we provide new examples of Bonnet mates that were not previously considered. In particular, we prove that the aforesaid continuous deformations only exist for minimal surfaces in the product spaces $\mathbb{S}^2\times\mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{H}^2\times\mathbb{R}$ and otherwise only for surfaces with constant principal curvatures. In the case of $\mathrm{Sol}_3$, we give a characterization of Bonnet mates via a system of two differential equations, addressing a problem proposed in~\cite{GMM}. We conclude that the only surfaces admitting continuous isometric deformations that preserve the principal curvatures in $\mathrm{Sol}_3$ are those with constant left-invariant Gauss map.