On the umbilicity of linear Weingarten spacelike submanifolds immersed in the de Sitter space

Abstract

We investigate the umbilicity of [Formula: see text]-dimensional complete linear Weingarten spacelike submanifolds immersed with parallel normalized mean curvature vector field in the de Sitter space [Formula: see text] of index [Formula: see text]. We recall that a spacelike submanifold is said to be linear Weingarten when its mean curvature function [Formula: see text] and its normalized scalar curvature [Formula: see text] satisfy a linear relation of the type [Formula: see text], for some constants [Formula: see text]. Under suitable constraints on the values of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], we apply a generalized maximum principle for a modified Cheng–Yau operator [Formula: see text] in order to show that such a spacelike submanifold must be either totally umbilical or isometric to a product [Formula: see text], where the factors [Formula: see text] are totally umbilical submanifolds of [Formula: see text] which are mutually perpendicular along their intersections. Moreover, we also study the case in which these spacelike submanifolds are [Formula: see text]-parabolic.