A geometric study of marginally trapped surfaces in space forms and Robertson-Walker spacetimes -- an overview

A marginally trapped surface in a spacetime is a Riemannian surface whose mean curvature vector is lightlike at every point. In this paper we give an up-to-date overview of the differential geometric study of these surfaces in Minkowski, de Sitter, anti-de Sitter and Robertson-Walker spacetimes. We give the general local descriptions proven by Anciaux and his coworkers as well as the known classifications of marginally trapped surfaces satisfying one of the following additional geometric conditions: having positive relative nullity, having parallel mean curvature vector field, having finite type Gauss map, being invariant under a one-parameter group of ambient isometries, being isotropic, being pseudo-umbilical. Finally, we provide examples of constant Gaussian curvature marginally trapped surfaces and state some open questions.Comment: 21 page

Sequences of harmonic maps in the 3-sphere

We define two transforms between non-conformal harmonic maps from a surface into the 3-sphere. With these transforms one can construct, from one such harmonic map, a sequence of harmonic maps. We show that there is a correspondence between non-conformal harmonic maps into the 3-sphere, $H$-surfaces in Euclidean 3-space and almost complex surfaces in the nearly K\"ahler manifold $S^3\times S^3$. As a consequence we can construct sequences of $H$-surfaces and almost complex surfaces.Comment: 14 pages. Second version. The article has been extended and is thoroughly revise

Pseudo-parallel Lagrangian submanifolds are semi-parallel

We prove a conjecture formulated by Pablo M. Chacon and Guillermo A. Lobos in [Pseudo-parallel Lagrangian submanifolds in complex space forms, Differential Geom. Appl.] stating that every Lagrangian pseudo-parallel submanifold of a complex space form of dimension at least 3 is semi-parallel