ISOMETRIC IMMERSION OF COMPLETE SURFACES WITH SLOWLY DECAYING NEGATIVE GAUSS CURVATURE

The isometric immersion of two-dimensional Riemannian manifolds or surfaces in the three-dimensional Euclidean space is a fundamental problem in differential geometry. When the Gauss curvature is negative, the isometric immersion problem is considered in this paper through the Gauss-Codazzi system for the second fundamental forms. It is shown that if the Gauss curvature satisfies an integrability condition, the surface has a global smooth isometric immersion in the three-dimensional Euclidean space even if the Gauss curvature decays very slowly at infinity. The new idea of the proof is based on the novel observations on the decay properties of the Riemann invariants of the Gauss-Codazzi system. The weighted Riemann invariants are introduced and a comparison principle is applied with properly chosen control functions.