Classification results for biharmonic submanifolds in spheres

Abstract

We study biharmonic submanifolds of the Euclidean sphere that satisfy certain geometric properties. We classify: (i) the biharmonic hypersurfaces with at most two distinct principal curvatures; (ii) the conformally at biharmonic hypersurfaces. We obtain some rigidity results for pseudo-umbilical biharmonic submanifolds of codimension 2 and for biharmonic surfaces with parallel mean curvature vector field. We also study the type, in the sense of B-Y. Chen, of compact proper biharmonic submanifolds with constant mean curvature in spheres.