Willmore Spheres in Compact Riemannian Manifolds

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the variational analysis of the Willmore, and other L^2 curvature functionals, among immersions of 2-dimensional surfaces into a compact riemannian m-manifold (M^m,h) with m>2. The goal of the paper is twofold, on one hand, we give the right setting for doing the calculus of variations (including min max methods) of such functionals for immersions into manifolds and, on the other hand, we prove existence results for possibly branched Willmore spheres under various constraints (prescribed homotopy class, prescribed area) or under curvature assumptions for M^m. To this aim, using the integrability by compensation, we develop first the regularity theory for the critical points of such functionals. We then prove a rigidity theorem concerning the relation between CMC and Willmore spheres. Then we prove that, for every non null 2-homotopy class, there exists a representative given by a Lipschitz map from the 2-sphere into M^m realizing a connected family of conformal smooth (possibly branched) area constrained Willmore spheres (as explained in the introduction, this comes as a natural extension of the minimal immersed spheres in homotopy class constructed by Sacks and Uhlembeck in \cite{SaU}, in situations when they do not exist). Moreover, for every A>0 we minimize the Willmore functional among connected families of weak, possibly branched, immersions of the 2-sphere having prescribed total area equal to A and we prove full regularity for the minimizer. Finally, under a mild curvature condition on (M^m,h), we minimize the sum of the area with the square of the L^2 norm of the second fundamental form, among weak possibly branched immersions of the two sphere and we prove the regularity of the minimizer.

58 pages

References in corpus (4)

• Immersed Spheres of Finite Total Curvature into Manifolds
• Existence of immersed spheres minimizing curvature functionals in compact 3-manifolds
• Bubble tree of a class of conformal mappings and applications to Willmore functional
• Energy Quantization for Willmore Surfaces and Applications

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• Energy Quantization of Willmore surfaces at the boundary of the Moduli Space
• Global Conformal Invariants of Submanifolds
• Minimizers of the Willmore functional with a small area constraint
• A Resolution of the Poisson Problem for Elastic Plates
• Existence of generalized totally umbilic 2-spheres in perturbed 3-spheres
• Complete Willmore surfaces in H3 with bounded energy: boundary regularity and bubbling
• Concentration of small Willmore spheres in Riemannian 3-manifolds
• Foliation by area-constrained Willmore spheres near a non-degenerate critical point of the scalar curvature
• Embedded area-constrained Willmore tori of small area in Riemannian three-manifolds I: Minimization
• Minimizers of Generalized Willmore Functionals
• Confined Willmore energy and the Area functional