Stationary points of O'Hara's knot energies (Q1938849)

In this article the authors study the regularity of stationary points of the knot energies \(E ^{(\alpha )}\) introduced by O'Hara in 1991 in the range \({\alpha\in(2,3)}\). They show that stationary points of finite energy are of class \(C ^{\infty }\) -- so especially all local minimizers of \(E ^{(\alpha )}\) among curves with fixed length are smooth (\(\alpha\in (2,3)\)). In order to do this the authors, in particular, prove that \(E ^{(\alpha )}\) is \(C ^{1}\) on the set of all regular embedded curves belonging to fractional Sobolev space \({{H^{(\alpha+1)/2,2}(\mathbb {R}/\mathbb {Z}, \mathbb {R}^n)}}\) and calculate its derivative.