Theory of submanifolds, associativity equations in 2D topological quantum field theories, and Frobenius manifolds

We prove that the associativity equations of two-dimensional topological quantum field theories are very natural reductions of the fundamental nonlinear equations of the theory of submanifolds in pseudo-Euclidean spaces and give a natural class of flat torsionless potential submanifolds. We show that all flat torsionless potential submanifolds in pseudo-Euclidean spaces bear natural structures of Frobenius algebras on their tangent spaces. These Frobenius structures are generated by the corresponding flat first fundamental form and the set of the second fundamental forms of the submanifolds (in fact, the structural constants are given by the set of the Weingarten operators of the submanifolds). We prove that each $N$-dimensional Frobenius manifold can be locally represented as a flat torsionless potential submanifold in a $2N$-dimensional pseudo-Euclidean space. By our construction, this submanifold is uniquely determined up to motions. Moreover, we consider a nonlinear system that is a natural generalization of the associativity equations, namely, the system describing all flat torsionless submanifolds in pseudo-Euclidean spaces, and prove that this system is integrable by the inverse scattering method.