The index of cubic focal manifolds

Abstract

We calculate the index and nullity of the three orientable focal manifolds of isoparametric hypersurfaces in spheres with three distinct principal curvatures. It turns out that the index is equal to the dimension of the ambient Euclidean space and the nullity is completely determined by the normal part of Killing vector fields of the ambient sphere. In that sense, the Veronese embeddings of the projective planes are as stable as possible for non totally geodesic submanifolds of the sphere.