The Willmore flow of Hopf-tori in the 3-sphere (Q6084911)

The paper analyzes the long-time behaviour of the solution to the classical Willmore flow written as \[\partial _{t}f_{t}=-\frac{1}{2}(\Delta _{f_{t}}^{\perp }{H}_{f_{t}}+Q(A_{f_{t}}^{0})({H} _{f_{t}}))=-\nabla _{L^{2}}\mathcal{W}(f_{t}),\] for differentiable families of \(C^{4}\)-immersions \(f_{t}:\Sigma \rightarrow M\), where \(\Sigma \) is a closed smooth orientable surface, \(M=\mathbb{R}^{n}\) or \(M=\mathbb{S}^{n}\), \( A_{f}^{0}\) is the trace-free part of the second fundamental form \(A_{f}\) of the immersion \(f\), \({H}_{f}\) the mean curvature vector of \(f\), \( Q(A_{f}^{0})\) operates on sections \(\phi \) into the normal bundle of \(f\), \( \mathcal{W}(f)\) is the Willmore energy defined through \[\mathcal{W} (f)=\int_{\Sigma }K_{f}^{M}+\frac{1}{4}\left\vert {H}_{f}\right\vert ^{2}d\mu _{f},\] where \(K_{f}^{M}(x)\) denotes the sectional curvature of \(M\) with respect to the immersed tangent plane \(Df_{x}(T_{x}\Sigma )\) in \( T_{f(x)}M\). The author also considers the modified Willmore flow written as \[\partial _{t}f_{t}=-\frac{1}{2}\left\vert A_{f_{t}}^{0}\right\vert ^{4}(\Delta _{f_{t}}^{\perp }{H}_{f_{t}}+Q(A_{f_{t}}^{0})({H} _{f_{t}}))-\left\vert A_{f_{t}}^{0}\right\vert ^{4}\nabla _{L^{2}}\mathcal{W} (f_{t}).\] The main result proves that if \(\gamma _{0}:\mathbb{S} ^{1}\rightarrow \mathbb{S}^{2}\) is a smooth, closed and regular path in \( \mathbb{S}^{2}\), \(F_{0}:\Sigma \rightarrow \mathbb{S}^{3}\) is an arbitrary smooth immersion, which maps a compact smooth torus simply onto the Hopf-torus \(\pi ^{-1}(\mathrm{tr}(\gamma _{0}))\) in an appropriate sense, there is a unique smooth global solution \(\{\mathcal{P}(t,0,F_{0})\}_{t\geq 0}\) to the modified Willmore flow on \([0,\infty )\times \Sigma \), starting from \( F_{0}\) at time \(t=0\). The immersions \(\mathcal{P}(t,0,F_{0})\) remain umbilic-free and map simply onto Hopf-tori for every \(t\geq 0\). This global solution \(\{\mathcal{P}(t,0,F_{0})\}_{t\geq 0}\) subconverges in every \(C^{m}\)-norm, up to reparametrizations, to smooth Willmore-Hopf-tori in \(\mathbb{S} ^{3}\). More precisely, for every sequence \(t_{j}\rightarrow \infty \), there are a subsequence of times \(t_{j_{k}}\rightarrow \infty \), a sequence of diffeomorphisms \(\varphi _{k}:\Sigma \overset{\cong }{\rightarrow }\Sigma \) and a smooth immersion \(\widehat{F}:\Sigma \rightarrow \mathbb{S}^{3}\) mapping simply onto some smoothly immersed Willmore-Hopf-torus in \(\mathbb{S} ^{3}\), such that: \(\mathcal{P}(t_{j_{k}},0,F_{0})\circ \varphi _{k}\rightarrow \widehat{F}\) in \(C^{m}(\Sigma ,\mathbb{R}^{4})\), as \(k\rightarrow \infty \), \(\forall m\in \mathbb{N}_{0}\). Moreover, if the initial immersion \( F_{0}:\Sigma \rightarrow \mathbb{S}^{3}\) maps the smooth torus simply onto a Hopf-torus in \(\mathbb{S}^{3}\) with Willmore energy \(\mathcal{W}(F_{0})\leq \frac{8\pi ^{2}}{\sqrt{2}}\), there is a smooth family of smooth diffeomorphisms \(\Psi _{t}:\Sigma \rightarrow \Sigma \), such that the reparametrization \(\{\mathcal{P}(t,0,F_{0})\circ \Psi _{t}\}\) of the flow line \(\{\mathcal{P}(t,0,F_{0})\}\) consists of smooth diffeomorphisms between the smooth torus and their images in \(\mathbb{S}^{3}\) for sufficiently large \(t\), and the family \(\{\mathcal{P}(t,0,F_{0})\circ \Psi _{t}\}\) converges fully in \(C^{m}(\Sigma ,\mathbb{R}^{4})\), for each \(m\in \mathbb{N}_{0}\), to some smooth diffeomorphism \(F^{\ast }\) between \(\Sigma \) and a conformally transformed Clifford torus in \(\mathbb{S}^{3}\). For the proof, the author first proves a short time existence result and a uniqueness result for the classical Willmore flow. He then uses \textit{P. Breuning}'s compactness theorem [J. Geom. Anal. 25, No. 2, 1344--1386 (2015; Zbl 1318.53060)] to prove the \(C^{m}\)-subconvergence. Moreover he proves a Lojasiewicz-Simon gradient inequality for closed curves \(\gamma ^{\ast }:\mathbb{S}^{1}\rightarrow \mathbb{S}^{2}\) which are critical points of an elastic energy functional. He also proves a Hopf-Willmore identity which establishes a link between the Hopf fibration and the first variation of the Willmore functional.