Rigidity Results for Compact Submanifolds with Pinched Ricci Curvature in Euclidean and Spherical Space Forms

For compact submanifolds in Euclidean and Spherical space forms with Ricci curvature bounded below by a function $α(n,k,H,c)$ of mean curvature, we prove that the submanifold is either isometric to the Einstein Clifford torus, or a topological sphere for the maximal bound $α(n,[\frac{n}{2}],H,c)$, or has up to $k$-th homology groups vanishing. This gives an almost complete (except for the differentiable sphere theorem) characterization of compact submanifolds with pinched Ricci curvature, generalizing celebrated rigidity results obtained by Ejiri, Xu-Tian, Xu-Gu, Xu-Leng-Gu, Vlachos, Dajczer-Vlachos.