Biminimal immersions

Abstract

We study biminimal immersions, that is immersions which are critical points of the bienergy for normal variations with fixed energy. We give a geometrical description of the Euler-Lagrange equation associated to biminimal immersions for: i) biminimal curves in a Riemannian manifold, with particular care to the case of curves in a space form ii) isometric immersions of codimension one in a Riemannian manifold, in particular for surfaces of a three-dimensional manifold. We describe two methods to construct families of biminimal surfaces using both Riemannian and horizontally homothetic submersions.