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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
We extend the concept of umbilicity to higher order umbilicity in Riemannian manifolds saying that an isometric immersion is k-umbilical when APk−1(A) is a multiple of the identity, where Pk(A) is the kth Newton polynomial in the second fundamental form A with P0(A) being the identity. Thus, for k=1, one-umbilical coincides with umbilical. We determine the principal curvatures of the two-umbilical isometric immersions in terms of the mean curvatures. We give a description of the two-umbilical isometric immersions in space forms which includes the product of spheres embedded in the Euclidean sphere S2k+1 of radius 1. We also introduce an operator φk which measures how an isometric immersion fails to be k-umbilical, giving in particular that φ1 ≡ 0 if and only if the immersion is totally umbilical. We characterize the two-umbilical hypersurfaces of a space form as images of isometric immersions of Einstein manifolds.