A time-flat condition on spacelike 2-surfaces in spacetime is considered here. This condition is analogous to constant torsion condition for curves in three dimensional space and has been studied in [2, 4, 5, 12, 13]. In particular, any 2-surface in a static slice of a static spacetime is time-flat. In this article, we address the question in the title and prove several local and global rigidity theorems for such surfaces in the Minkowski spacetime.

In this paper, we study the space of translational limits T (M) of a surface M properly embedded in R3 with nonzero constant mean curvature and bounded second fundamental form. There is a natural map T which assigns to any surface Σ ∈ T (M) the set T (Σ) ⊂ T(M). Among various dynamics type results we prove that surfaces in minimal T -invariant sets of T (M) are chord-arc. We also show that if M has an infinite number of ends, then there exists a nonempty minimal T -invariant set in T (M) consisting entirely of surfaces with planes of Alexandrov symmetry. Finally, when M has a plane of Alexandrov symmetry, we prove the following characterization theorem: M has finite topology if and only if M has a finite number of ends greater than one.

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We prove a graph theoretic closed formula for coefficients in the Tian-Yau-Zelditch asymptotic expansion of the Bergman kernel. The formula is expressed in terms of the characteristic polynomial of the directed graphs representing Weyl invariants. The proof relies on a combinatorial interpretation of a recursive formula due to M. Engli\v s and A. Loi.