Rigidity and non-rigidity results for conformal immersions (Q2354389)

The Willmore energy, \(\mathcal{W}(\cdot)\), stands for an action associated to the Euler-Lagrange equation of a nonlinear partial differential equation involving the Gaussian and the mean curvature of a surface. A critical point of this action is a Willmore surface. The authors study a few (non-)rigidity results. First, they recall \(W_{\mathrm{conf}}^{2,2}((\Sigma,g),\mathbb R^n)\), the space of conformal immersions to \(g\), i.e., a subspace of the Sobolev space, \(W^{2,2}((\Sigma,g),\mathbb R^n)\) on the Riemann surface \((\Sigma,g)\), such that locally \(g\) is conformal to the Euclidean metric, \(g_{\mathrm{eucli}}\), which means that there is a conformal factor \(u\) such that \(g=e^ug_{\mathrm{eucli}}\). The first main theorem deals with a rigidity result and states that if \(\mathcal{W}(f)\) is bounded by \(6\pi+\delta\) for \(f\in W_{\mathrm{conf}}^{2,2}(\mathbb R\mathbb P^2,\mathbb R^n)\), where \(n\geq4\) and \(\delta\) is a positive constant, then there exists a constant \(\omega(\delta)\) (converging to zero with \(\delta\)) such that the sum of the \(W^{2,2}(\mathbb R\mathbb P^2,\mathbb R^n)\)-norm of \(\sigma\circ f-f_V\) and the \(L_\infty(\mathbb R\mathbb P^2)\)-norm of \(u-u_V\) is bounded by \(\omega(\delta)\), where the quantities \(\sigma,f_V,\) and \((u,u_V)\) stand for a Möbius transformation on \(\mathbb R^n\), the \(\mathbb R^4\)-valued Veronese embedding map, and the conformal factors of the conformal immersions \((\sigma\circ f,f_V)\), respectively (Theorem 2.1). Among the tools used for the proof, the authors apply a previous result stating that if \((f_k)_{k\in\mathbb N}\) is a sequence of conformal immersions on \(\Sigma\) such that the image of each \(f_k\) by \(\mathcal{W}(\cdot)\) is bounded, then there are a sequence \((\sigma_k)_{k\in\mathbb N}\) of Möbius transformations and a finite set \(S\) in \(\Sigma\), respectively, such that \(\sigma_k\circ f_k\) converges weakly in \(W^{2,2}(\Sigma\setminus S,\mathbb R^n)\) to a conformal immersion on \(\Sigma\setminus S\) and the second fundamental form is a quadratically integrable function on a punctured neighbourhood of each point of \(S\) (Proposition 2.3). Furthermore, the conformal factors sequence of the conformal factors (associated to \((f_k)_{k\in\mathbb N}\)) are bounded w.r.t. the \(L_\infty(\Sigma\setminus S)\)-norm. Also the authors show that the rigidity result does not work for the critical points (of \(\mathcal{W}(\cdot)\)) belonging to \(W_{\mathrm{conf}}^{2,2}(\mathbb R\mathbb P^2,\mathbb R^3)\) (subsection 3.3). The second main theorem deals with the non-rigidity results (Theorem 3.1).