Critical tori for mean curvature energies in Killing submersions (Q2201761)

A Riemannian submersion from a 3-dimensional manifold to a surface is called a Killing submersion if its fibers are the trajectories of a complete unit Killing vector field. The author studies critical tori for energies depending on the mean curvature in total spaces of Killing submersions, which extend the classical notion of Willmore energy. These tori are based on closed curves critical for curvature energy functionals in surfaces with constant curvature. After so-called binormal evolution (the evolution under the extension of the Killing vector field along a curve in the direction of the binormal), critical curves in these surfaces are the profile curves of rotational tori, which are Weingarten surfaces (i.e., the two principal curvatures satisfy a non-trivial functional relation). The correspondence between these two types of tori is illustrated using the standard Hopf mapping between spheres.