A frame energy for immersed tori and applications to regular homotopy classes (Q333249)

The authors consider the frame energy (Dirchlet energy) of smooth immersions of the abstract 2-torus into \(\mathbb R^m\) with \(m\geq 3\). It is bounded from below by \(2\pi^2\) and equality holds if and only if \(m \geq 4\), the immersed torus is, up to isometries and dilations, the Clifford torus, and the moving frame is defined by the natural flat coordinates. This result also holds for weak immersions in the sense of [the second author, J. Reine Angew. Math. 695, 41--98 (2014; Zbl 1304.49095)]. Since the frame energy's normal component is the well-known Willmore energy, the lower bound is related to the Willmore conjecture recently proved by \textit{F. C. Marques} and \textit{A. Neves} [Ann. Math. (2) 179, No. 2, 683--782 (2014; Zbl 1297.49079)]. In fact, it is implied in the codimension-one case. The authors also prove that the critical points of the frame energy are smooth and they demonstrate that each of the two regular homotopy classes of immersions of the 2-torus into \(\mathbb R^3\) contains a smooth minimizer of the frame energy.