The second fundamental form of the real Kaehler submanifolds

Abstract Let $f\colon M^{2n}\to \mathbb {R}^{2n+p}$ , $2\leq p\leq n-1$ , be an isometric immersion of a Kaehler manifold into Euclidean space. Yan and Zheng (2013, Michigan Mathematical Journal 62, 421–441) conjectured that if the codimension is $p\leq 11$ , then, along any connected component of an open dense subset of $M^{2n}$ , the submanifold is as follows: it is either foliated by holomorphic submanifolds of dimension at least $2n-2p$ with tangent spaces in the kernel of the second fundamental form whose images are open subsets of affine vector subspaces, or it is embedded holomorphically in a Kaehler submanifold of $\mathbb {R}^{2n+p}$ of larger dimension than $2n$ . This bold conjecture was proved by Dajczer and Gromoll just for codimension 3 and then by Yan and Zheng for codimension 4. In this paper, we prove that the second fundamental form of the submanifold behaves pointwise as expected in case that the conjecture is true. This result is a first fundamental step for a possible classification of the nonholomorphic Kaehler submanifolds lying with low codimension in Euclidean space. A counterexample shows that our proof does not work for higher codimension, indicating that proposing $p=11$ in the conjecture as the largest codimension is appropriate.