Equiaffine Darboux frames for codimension 2 submanifolds contained in hypersurfaces

Abstract

Consider a codimension 1 submanifold $N^n\subset M^{n+1}$, where $M^{n+1}\subset \mathbb{R}^{n+2}$ is a hypersurface. The envelope of tangent spaces of $M$ along $N$ generalizes the concept of tangent developable surface of a surface along a curve. In this paper, we study the singularities of these envelopes.

There are some important examples of submanifolds that admit a vector field tangent to $M$ and transversal to $N$ whose derivative in any direction of $N$ is contained in $N$. When this is the case, one can construct transversal plane bundles and affine metrics on $N$ with the desirable properties of being equiaffine and apolar. Moreover, this transversal bundle coincides with the classical notion of Transon plane. But we also give an explicit example of a submanifold that does not admit a vector field with the above property.