Embedded surfaces of arbitrary genus minimizing the Willmore energy under isoperimetric constraint (Q2453976)

The authors study the minimization of the Willmore energy under a fixed isoperimetric ratio when the underlying abstract surface has fixed genus \(g\geq 0\). The Willmore functional of an immersion \(\overrightarrow{\Phi}\) of an abstract surface \(\Sigma^2\) is given by \(W(\overrightarrow{\Phi})=\int_{\Sigma^2}|\overrightarrow{H}|^2dvol_g\), where \(\overrightarrow{H}\) is the mean curvature of the immersion \(\overrightarrow{\Phi}\) and \(dvol_g\) is the induced volume form. The surfaces that are critical points of the Willmore functional are called Willmore surfaces. The Willmore functional is used very much in various fields of sciences and technology: in biology in the study of lipid bilayer cell membranes under the name Helfrich energy, in general relativity as being the main term in the Hawking mass, in string theory, in high energy physics (the Polyakov extrinsic action), in elasticity theory, in optics and lens design etc. The existence of minimizers has been obtained in several situations: within a fixed conformal class, the class of smooth embeddings \(\overrightarrow{\Phi}\) of the sphere under fixed isoperimetric ratio \(iso(\overrightarrow{\Phi})=(Area(\overrightarrow{\Phi}))^3/ (Vol(\overrightarrow{\Phi}))^2\), where \(Vol(\overrightarrow{\Phi})\) denotes the volume enclosed by \(\overrightarrow{\Phi}(\Sigma^2)\), i.e. the volume of the bounded connected component of \(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus \overrightarrow{\Phi}(\Sigma^2)\). Denote by \(\mathcal{E}_{\Sigma^2}\) the space of Lipschitz immersions of \(\Sigma^2\). Assuming that the underlying abstract surface \(\Sigma^2\) is closed of genus \(\geq 0\), the authors look for minimizers of the Willmore energy in the class of Lipschitz immersions with second fundamental form in \(L^2\) under the additional constraint that the isoperimetric ratio is fixed. The authors use the parametric approach in order to obtain a new proof of Schygulla's theorem. In fact, the authors obtain a stronger result. The minimization is performed in the larger class of weak immersions, rather than among smooth embeddings. The results are stated in the Theorems 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6.