Weakly trapped submanifolds in standard static spacetimes

Abstract

We study weakly trapped submanifolds of codimension two in a standard static spacetime. In this setting, we apply some generalized maximum principles in order to investigate the geometry of these trapped submanifolds. For instance, we establish sufficient conditions to guarantee that such a spacelike submanifold must be a hypersurface of the Riemannian base of the ambient spacetime. As a consequence, we prove that there do not exist n-dimensional compact (without boundary) trapped submanifolds immersed in an (n+2)-dimensional standard static spacetime. Such a nonexistence result was originally obtained for stationary spacetimes by Mars and Senovilla [20]. Furthermore, we also investigate parabolic weakly trapped submanifolds immersed in a standard static spacetime.