The isometric immersion of surfaces with finite total curvature

Abstract

In this paper, we study the smooth isometric immersion of a complete simply connected surface with a negative Gauss curvature in the three-dimensional Euclidean space. For a surface with a finite total Gauss curvature and appropriate oscillations of the Gauss curvature, we prove the global existence of a smooth solution to the Gauss-Codazzi system and thus establish a global smooth isometric immersion of the surface into the three-dimensional Euclidean space. Based on a crucial observation that some linear combinations of the Riemann invariants decay faster than others, we reformulate the Gauss-Codazzi system as a symmetric hyperbolic system with a partial damping. Such a damping effect and an energy approach permit us to derive global decay estimates and meanwhile control the non-integrable coefficients of nonlinear terms.Comment: 53 pages, 1 figur