Bryant surfaces with smooth ends (Q987897)

The purpose of this paper is to study Bryant surfaces with smooth ends. A smooth end is a conformally immersed punctured disc of mean curvature \(1\) in hyperbolic space that extends smoothly through the ideal boundary. The authors give explicit examples of Bryant spheres with an arbitrary number of smooth ends. An interesting result is given in Theorem 5.1 and it shows that the Willmore energy of a compact Bryant surface with smooth ends is \(4\pi N\), where \(N\) is the total pole order of \(F\) on a fundamental domain, and \(F\) is the meromorphic \(SL(2,\mathbb{C})\)-valued map with \(SU(2)\)-monodromy representing the surface on a compact Riemann surface. In the last section of the paper they prove that Bryant's quartic differential vanishes identically for a compact surface in \(S^3\) if and only if it is the compactification of either a complete finite total curvature Euclidean minimal surface with planar ends or a compact Bryant surface with smooth ends.