Dressing transformations of constrained Willmore surfaces (Q402737)

The Willmore functional is a conformally invariant functional, defined on immersed surfaces in the conformal \(n\)-sphere. Its extrema are the Willmore surfaces and these have attracted attention in recent years, mainly due to interest in the celebrated Willmore conjecture. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEOne approach to Willmore surfaces is via a certain Gauss map. Alternatively, it may be viewed as a map into the space of \(2\)-spheres which is a certain Grassmannian of \(4\)-planes. A key result is that a surface is Willmore if and only if its central sphere congruence is a harmonic map and then integrable systems theory becomes available. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEHarmonic maps admit dressing transformations which arise by applying carefully chosen gauge transformations to the family of flat connections. A larger class of surfaces arises when one imposes the weaker requirement that a surface extremizes the Willmore functional only with respect to variations which preserve the conformal structure: these are the constrained Willmore surfaces. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEIn the paper under review, the authors apply the theory of dressing transformations to constrained Willmore surfaces in arbitrary codimension. An adaptation of the Terng-Uhlenbeck theory of dressing by simple factors to this context leads to define Bäcklund transforms of these surfaces for which Bianchi permutability is proved. For codimension \(2\), the authors generalize the Darboux transforms of Willmore surfaces via Riccati equations, due to Burstall-Ferus-Leschke-Pedit-Pinkall, to the constrained Willmore case.