Special canal surfaces of S(3)

摘要

Canal surfaces defined as envelopes of 1-parameter families of spheres, can be characterized by the vanishing of one of the conformal principal curvatures. We distinguish special canals which are characterized by the fact that the non-vanishing conformal principal curvature is constant along the characteristic circles and show that they are conformally equivalent to either surfaces of revolution, or to cones over plane curves, or to cylinders over plane curves, so they are isothermic.