On the rigidity of hypersurfaces into space forms

Our purpose is to study the rigidity of complete hypersurfaces immersed into a Riemannian space form. In this setting, first we use a classical characterization of the Euclidean sphere \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb S ^{n+1}$$\end{document} due to Obata (J Math Soc Jpn 14:333–340, 1962) in order to prove that a closed orientable hypersurface \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\Sigma ^n$$\end{document} immersed with null second-order mean curvature in \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb S ^{n+1}$$\end{document} must be isometric to a totally geodesic sphere \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb S ^{n}$$\end{document}, provided that its Gauss mapping is contained in a closed hemisphere. Furthermore, as suitable applications of a maximum principle at the infinity for complete noncompact Riemannian manifolds due to Yau (Indiana Univ Math J 25:659–670, 1976), we establish new characterizations of totally geodesic hypersurfaces in the Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces. We also obtain a lower estimate of the index of minimum relative nullity concerning complete noncompact hypersurfaces immersed in such ambient spaces.