An estimate for the genus of embedded surfaces in the 3-sphere

Abstract: By refining the volume estimate of Heintze and Karcher cite{HK}, we obtain a sharp pinching estimate for the genus of a surface in

m a t h b b S^{3}

, which involves an integral of the norm of its traceless second fundamental form. More specifically, we show that if

g

is the genus of a closed orientable surface

S i g m a

in a

3

-dimensional orientable Riemannian manifold

M

whose sectional curvature is bounded below by

1

, then

4 p i^{2} g (S i g m a) l e 2 l e f t (2 p i^{2} - | M | i g h t) + i n t_{S i g m a} f (| s t a c k r e l c i r c A |)

, where

s t a c k r e l c i r c A

is the traceless second fundamental form and

f

is an explicit function. As a result, the space of closed orientable embedded minimal surfaces

S i g m a

with uniformly bounded

| A |_{L^{3} (S i g m a)}

is compact in the

C^{k}

topology for any

k g e 2

.

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