The maximally symmetric surfaces in the 3-torus (Q2406824)

In a recent paper, \textit{C. Wang, S. Wang, Y. Zhang} and the reviewer [Groups Geom. Dyn. 9, No. 4, 1001--1045 (2015; Zbl 1339.57027)] classified all highly symmetric embeddings of a closed orientable surface of genus \(g > 1\) into the 3-sphere \(S^3\), i.e. all embeddings invariant under a large finite group of diffeomorphisms of \(S^3\) (which, by the geometrization of finite group actions on 3-manifolds, can be assumed to be orthogonal); the maximal possible order is \(12(g-1)\) (for the case of embeddings into Euclidean space \(\mathbb R^3\) instead, see the paper by the same authors [Sci. China, Math. 60, No. 9, 1599--1614 (2017; Zbl 1387.57033)]). In the present paper, the analogous problem is considered for embeddings of closed surfaces into the 3-dimensional torus \(T^3\). Again the maximal possible order is \(12(g-1)\) (for orientation-preserving actions), and the authors show that this maximal order is achieved for \(g = n^2 + 1, 3n^2 + 1, 2n^3 + 1, 4n^3 + 1\) and \(8n^3 + 1\); they conjecture that these are all such values of \(g\), and that all examples realizing these values are obtained by the constructions in the present paper. They consider also the orientation-reversing case. An embedding of a surface into \(T^3\) may be \textit{unknotted} or \textit{knotted} where unknotted means that the surface separates \(T^3\) into two handlebodies of genus \(g\) (giving a Heegaard decomposition of the 3-torus). It is known that a \textit{minimal surface} in \(T^3\) has to be unknotted, and the authors show that the upper bound \(12(g-1)\) can be achieved by a minimal surface for \(g = 2n^3 + 1, 4n^3 + 1\) and \(8n^3 + 1\) (passing to the universal covering of \(T^3\), their examples lift to known \textit{triply periodic minimal surfaces} in \(\mathbb R^3\)). On the other hand, they obtain knotted embeddings for \(g = n^2 + 1\), \(3n^2 + 1\), and also for the other values if 6 does not divide \(n\). The basic example of an unknotted surface is the unique minimal Heegaard surface of genus 3 of the 3-torus, invariant under an action of the symmetric group \(S_4\), the symmetry group of the cube. Finally, considering again \(S^3\), this raises the challenging question of which highly symmetric surfaces in \(S^3\) can be realized by minimal surfaces.