Willmore spheres in the 3-sphere revisited

Abstract

Bryant \cite{Bryant84} classified all Willmore spheres in $3$-space to be given by minimal surfaces in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$ with embedded planar ends. This note provides new explicit formulas for genus 0 minimal surfaces in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$ with $2k+1$ embedded planar ends for all $k\ge 4.$ Peng and Xiao claimed these examples to exist in \cite{PengXiao2000}, but in the same paper they also claimed the existence of a minimal surface with 7 embedded planar ends, which was falsified by Bryant \cite{Bryant88}.

3 pages