Minimal isometric immersions of inhomogeneous spherical space forms into spheres - A necessary condition for existence

Although much is known about minimal isometric immersions into spheres of homogeneous spherical space forms, there are no results in the literature about such immersions in the dominant case of inhomogeneous space forms. For a large class of these, we give a necessary condition for the existence of such an immersion of a given degree. This condition depends only upon the degree and the fundamental group of the space form and is given in terms of an explicitly computable function. Evaluating this function shows that neither L(5,2) nor L(8,3) admit a minimal isometric immersion into any sphere if the degree of the immersion is less than 28, or less than 20, respectively.