Compact stable surfaces with constant mean curvature in Killing submersions

Abstract

A Killing submersion is a Riemannian submersion from a 3-manifold to a surface, both connected and orientable, whose fibres are the integral curves of a Killing vector field, not necessarily unitary. The first part of this paper deals with the classification of all Killing submersions in terms of two geometric functions, namely the bundle curvature and the length of the Killing vector field, which can be prescribed arbitrarily. In a second part, we show that if the base is compact and the submersion admits a global section, then it also admits a global minimal section. These turn out to be the only global sections with constant mean curvature, which solves the Bernstein problem in Killing submersions over compact base surfaces, as well as the Plateau problem with empty boundary. Finally, we prove that any compact orientable stable surface with constant mean curvature immersed in the total space of a Killing submersion must be either an entire minimal section or everywhere tangent to the Killing direction.