Willmore minmax surfaces and the cost of the sphere eversion (Q2659437)

The Willmore surfaces are the critical points of the Willmore Lagrangian on immersions of oriented surfaces. They are relevant for minimal surface theory and conformal invariance. Going beyond the minimization, the paper provides a minmax method to obtain critical points of nonzero indices for the Willmore energy. In order to satisfy the Palais-Smale condition, a viscous approximation of Willmore energy is introduced. Various results in the setting of frame energies are shown.