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Minimal two-spheres of constant curvature in a quaternion projective space

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Abstract

We obtain a large number of new minimal 2-spheres of constant curvature in the quaternion projective space \({\mathbb{H}}\)Pn-1. Using the twistor fibration, we reduce the problem to constructing horizontal holomorphic spheres in the complex projective space \(\mathbb{C}P^{{2n - 1}}\). We prove that the set of such horizontal spheres is bijective to a closed disk consisting of certain anti-symmetric matrices modulo the action of \(U(1)\times SU(2)\). From this characterization, we deduce a lower bound on the dimension. Our method relies upon the singular decomposition analysis for the planes spanned by the spheres. Finally by checking the squared normal of the first \(\partial\)-return, we illustrate that the generic ones are not homogeneous, and thus not those that are classified.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. The second author would like to thank Prof. Q.S. Chi for encouragement and hospitality during his visit to WUSTL. This work was partially supported by NSFC No. 11871450. The second author was partially supported by China Post-Doctoral Grant BX20200012.

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Correspondence to Yan Xu.

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Jiao, X., Xu, Y. & Xin, J. Minimal two-spheres of constant curvature in a quaternion projective space. Annali di Matematica 201, 1139–1155 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10231-021-01151-0

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