Refinement of Hélein's conjecture on boundedness of conformal factors when n = 3

Geometric measure and integration theory, integral and normal currents in optimization (49Q15) Surfaces in Euclidean and related spaces (53A05) General geometric structures on manifolds (almost complex, almost product structures, etc.) (53C15) Differential geometry of immersions (minimal, prescribed curvature, tight, etc.) (53C42) General theory of differentiable manifolds (58A99) Harmonic maps, etc. (58E20) Applications of PDEs on manifolds (58J90)

Abstract: For smooth mappings of the unit disc into the oriented Grassmannian manifold

m a t h b b G_{n, 2}

, H'elein (2002) conjectured the global existence of Coulomb frames with bounded conformal factor provided the integral of

, the squared-length of the second fundamental form, is less than

g a m m a_{n} = 8 p i

. It has since been shown that the optimal bounds on the integral of

that guarantee this result are:

g a m m a_{3} = 8 p i

and

g a m m a_{n} = 4 p i

for

n g e q 4

. For isothermal immersions, this hypothesis is equivalent to saying the integral of the sum of the squares of the principal curvatures is less than

g a m m a_{n}

. The goal here is to prove that when

n = 3

the same conclusion holds under weaker hypotheses. In particular, it holds for isothermal immersions when

is square-integrable and the integral of

| K |

,

K

the Gauss curvature, is less than

4 p i

. Since

this implies the known result for isothermal immersions, but

| K |

may be small when

is large. That the result under the weaker hypothesis is sharp is shown by Enneper's surface and stereographic projections. The method, which is purely analytic, is then extended to investigate the case when the length of the second fundamental form is square-integrable.

Review text

Let \(D_{1}\) the closed unit disk centered at the origin in \(\mathbb{R}^{2}\), and \(\mathbb{S}^{2}\) the unit sphere in \(\mathbb{R}^{3}\). The purpose of the paper is to prove refinements of \textit{F. Hélein}'s conjecture in his book [Harmonic maps, conservation laws and moving frames. Transl. from the French. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2002; Zbl 1010.58010)]. The first main result proves that if \(u\in W^{1,2}(D_{1},\mathbb{S}^{2})\) satisfies \[ \int_{D_{1}}\left\vert \partial _{1}\mathbf{n}\times \partial _{2}\mathbf{n} \right\vert dX\leq 4\pi -\delta \] for the normal vector \(\mathbf{n}\) and some \(\delta>0\), then there exist \(\Omega _{i}\in L^{2}(D_{1})\) with \[\left\Vert \Omega _{i}\right\Vert _{L^{2}(D_{1})}\leq \frac{8\pi }{ \delta }\left\Vert \nabla u\right\Vert _{L^{2}(D_{1})},\] \(i=1,2\), such that for every \(\zeta \in C_{0}^{\infty }(D_{1})\) there holds \[\int_{D_{1}}\Phi \zeta dX=\int_{D_{1}}(\Omega _{2}\partial _{1}\zeta -\Omega _{1}\partial _{2}\zeta )dX,\] where \(\Phi (X)=\mathbf{n}(X)\cdot (\partial _{1}\mathbf{n}(X)\times \partial _{2}\mathbf{n}(X))\).\ Moreover \(\Phi \) satisfies \(\left\Vert \Phi \right\Vert _{W^{-1,2}(D_{1})}\leq \frac{c}{\delta }\) for some constant \(c\). For the proof, the authors first establish estimates on \(\Phi \) written as \( \Phi =\partial _{2}\omega _{1}-\partial _{1}\omega _{2}\). They introduce a parametrized family of normal vector fields and use a parameter continuation argument. The second main result proves that if \(u\in W^{1,2}(D_{1},\mathbb{S}^{2})\) and \(\mathcal{A}\subset \mathbb{S}^{2}\) is a Borel set with positive measure \(\mu \), then there exist \(\Omega _{i}\in L^{2}(D_{1})\), \(i=1,2\), such that for every \(\zeta \in C_{0}^{\infty }(D_{1}) \) \[\int_{D_{1}}\Phi \zeta dX=\frac{4\pi }{\mu }\int_{\mathcal{F}}\Phi \zeta dX+\int_{D_{1}}(\Omega _{2}\partial _{1}\zeta -\Omega _{1}\partial _{2}\zeta )dX,\] and \[\left\Vert \Omega _{i}\right\Vert _{L^{2}(D_{1})}\leq c\mu ^{-1/2}\left\Vert \nabla u\right\Vert _{L^{2}(D_{1})},\] for some constant \(c\). Moreover \(\Phi \) satisfies \[\left\Vert \Phi -\frac{4\pi }{\mu }\chi _{ \mathcal{F}}\Phi \right\Vert _{W^{-1,2}(D_{1})}\leq c\mu ^{-1/2}\left\Vert \nabla u\right\Vert _{L^{2}(D_{1})}.\] Here \(\mathcal{F}=\{X\in D_{1}: \mathbf{n}(X)\in \mathcal{A}\}\). The proof relies on other results found in the paper and on the theory of regular points and a co-area formula proved by \textit{F. Bethuel} and \textit{ X.M. Zheng} [J. Funct. Anal. 80, No. 1, 60--75 (1988;Zbl 0657.46027)].

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