We give a complete classification of umbilical submanifolds of arbitrary dimension and codimension of $\mathbb{S}^n\times \mathbb{R}$, extending the classification of umbilical surfaces in $\mathbb{S}^2\times \mathbb{R}$ by Souam and Toubiana as well as the local description of umbilical hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{S}^n\times \mathbb{R}$ by Van der Veken and Vrancken. We prove that, besides small spheres in a slice, up to isometries of the ambient space they come in a two-parameter family of rotational submanifolds whose substantial codimension is either one or two and whose profile is a curve in a totally geodesic $\mathbb{S}^1\times \mathbb{R}$ or $\mathbb{S}^2\times \mathbb{R}$, respectively, the former case arising in a one-parameter family. All of them are diffeomorphic to a sphere, except for a single element that is diffeomorphic to Euclidean space. We obtain explicit parametrizations of all such submanifolds. We also study more general classes of submanifolds of $\mathbb{S}^n\times \mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{H}^n\times \mathbb{R}$. In particular, we give a complete description of all submanifolds in those product spaces for which the tangent component of a unit vector field spanning the factor $\mathbb{R}$ is an eigenvector of all shape operators. We show that surfaces with parallel mean curvature vector in $\mathbb{S}^n\times \mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{H}^n\times \mathbb{R}$ having this property are rotational surfaces, and use this fact to improve some recent results by Alencar, do Carmo, and Tribuzy. We also obtain a Dajczer-type reduction of codimension theorem for submanifolds of $\mathbb{S}^n\times \mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{H}^n\times \mathbb{R}$.

We consider the $p$-Yang--Mills functional $(p\geq 2)$ defined as $\YM_p(\nabla):=\frac 1 p \int_M \|\rn\|^p$. We call critical points of $\YM_p(\cdot)$ the $p$-Yang--Mills connections, and the associated curvature $\rn$ the $p$-Yang--Mills fields. In this paper, we prove gap properties and instability theorems for $p$-Yang--Mills fields over submanifolds in $\mathbb{R}^{n+k}$ and $\mathbb{S}^{n+k}$.

In this paper, we characterize unitary representations of $\pi:=\piS$ whose generators $u_1, \dots, u_l$ (lying in conjugacy classes fixed initially) can be decomposed as products of two Lagrangian involutions $u_j=\s_j\s_{j+1}$ with $\s_{l+1}=\s_1$. Our main result is that such representations are exactly the elements of the fixed-point set of an anti-symplectic involution defined on the moduli space $\Mod:=\Hom_{\mathcal C}(\pi,U(n))/U(n)$. Consequently, as this fixed-point set is non-empty, it is a Lagrangian submanifold of $\Mod$. To prove this, we use the quasi-Hamiltonian description of the symplectic structure of $\Mod$ and give conditions on an involution defined on a quasi-Hamiltonian $U$-space $(M, \w, \mu\from M \to U)$ for it to induce an anti-symplectic involution on the reduced space $M/\!/U := \mu^{-1}(\{1\})/U$.

We explicitly describe the best approximation in geodesic submanifolds of positive definite matrices obtained from involutive congruence transformations on the Cartan-Hadamard manifold ${\mathrm{Sym}}(n,{\Bbb R})^{++}$ of positive definite matrices. An explicit calculation for the minimal distance function from the geodesic submanifold ${\mathrm{Sym}}(p,{\mathbb R})^{++}\times {\mathrm{Sym}}(q,{\mathbb R})^{++}$ block diagonally embedded in ${\mathrm{Sym}}(n,{\mathbb R})^{++}$ is given in terms of metric and spectral geometric means, Cayley transform, and Schur complements of positive definite matrices when $p\leq 2$ or $q\leq 2.$