Narrow Results

There are several well-known characterizations of the sphere as a regular surface in the Euclidean space. On the contrary, there are not so many characterizations of the hyperbolic space, the spacelike sphere in the Minkowski space. By means of a purely synthetic technique, we get a rigidity result for the sphere in 𝔼ⁿ⁺¹ without any curvature conditions, nor completeness or compactness, as well as a dual result for the n-dimensional hyperbolic space in 𝕃ⁿ⁺¹.

There are two smooth functions $\sigma$ and $\rho$ associated to a nontrivial concircular vector field $v$ on a connected Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$, called potential function and connecting function. In this paper, we show that presence of a timelike nontrivial concircular vector field influences the geometry of generalized Robertson–Walker space-times. We use a timelike concircular vector field $v$ on an $n$ -dimensional connected conformally flat Lorentzian manifold, $n>2$, to find a characterization of generalized Robertson–Walker space-time with fibers Einstein manifolds. It is interesting to note that for $n=4$ the concircular vector field annihilates energy-momentum tensor and also that in this case the potential function $\sigma$ is harmonic. In the second part of this paper, we show that presence of a nontrivial concircular vector field $v$ with connecting function $\rho$ on a complete and connected $n$ -dimensional conformally flat Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$, $n>2$, with Ricci curvature $\mathrm{\text{Ric}}(v,v)$ non-negative, satisfying $n(n-1)\rho +\tau =0$, is necessary and sufficient for $(M,g)$ to be isometric to either a sphere $S^n(c)$ or to the Euclidean space $E^n$, where $\tau$ is the scalar curvature.