Cyclic conformally flat hypersurfaces revisited

Abstract

In this article we classify the conformally flat Euclidean hypersurfaces of dimension three with three distinct principal curvatures of $\mathbb{R}^4$, $\mathbb{S}^3\times \mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{H}^3\times \mathbb{R}$ with the property that the tangent component of the vector field $\partial/\partial t$ is a principal direction at any point. Here $\partial/\partial t$ stands for either a constant unit vector field in $\mathbb{R}^4$ or the unit vector field tangent to the factor $\mathbb{R}$ in the product spaces $\mathbb{S}^3\times \mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{H}^3\times \mathbb{R}$, respectively. Then we use this result to give a simple proof of an alternative classification of the cyclic conformally flat hypersurfaces of $\mathbb{R}^4$, that is, the conformally flat hypersurfaces of $\mathbb{R}^4$ with three distinct principal curvatures such that the curvature lines correspondent to one of its principal curvatures are extrinsic circles. We also characterize the cyclic conformally flat hypersurfaces of $\mathbb{R}^4$ as those conformally flat hypersurfaces of dimension three with three distinct principal curvatures for which there exists a conformal Killing vector field of $\mathbb{R}^4$ whose tangent component is an eigenvector field correspondent to one of its principal curvatures.