The Classification of Branched Willmore Spheres in the 33-Sphere and the 44-Sphere

We extend the classification of Robert Bryant of Willmore spheres in $S^3$ to variational branched Willmore spheres $S^3$ and show that they are inverse stereographic projections of complete minimal surfaces with finite total curvature in $\mathbb{R}^3$ and vanishing flux. We also obtain a classification of variational branched Willmore spheres in $S^4$, generalising a theorem of Seb\'{a}stian Montiel. As a result of our asymptotic analysis at branch points, we obtain an improved $C^{1,1}$ regularity of the unit normal of variational branched Willmore surfaces in arbitrary codimension. We also prove that the width of Willmore sphere min-max procedures in dimension $3$ and $4$, such as the sphere eversion, is an integer multiple of $4\pi$.Comment: 74 pages, 1 figur

Weak closure of Singular Abelian LpL^p-bundles in 33 dimensions

We prove the closure for the sequential weak $L^p$-topology of the class of vectorfields on $B^3$ having integer flux through almost every sphere. We show how this problem is connected to the study of the minimization problem for the Yang-Mills functional in dimension higher than critical, in the abelian case.Comment: 29 pages, some typing errors fixe

Willmore Spheres in Compact Riemannian Manifolds

The paper is devoted to the variational analysis of the Willmore, and other L^2 curvature functionals, among immersions of 2-dimensional surfaces into a compact riemannian m-manifold (M^m,h) with m>2. The goal of the paper is twofold, on one hand, we give the right setting for doing the calculus of variations (including min max methods) of such functionals for immersions into manifolds and, on the other hand, we prove existence results for possibly branched Willmore spheres under various constraints (prescribed homotopy class, prescribed area) or under curvature assumptions for M^m. To this aim, using the integrability by compensation, we develop first the regularity theory for the critical points of such functionals. We then prove a rigidity theorem concerning the relation between CMC and Willmore spheres. Then we prove that, for every non null 2-homotopy class, there exists a representative given by a Lipschitz map from the 2-sphere into M^m realizing a connected family of conformal smooth (possibly branched) area constrained Willmore spheres (as explained in the introduction, this comes as a natural extension of the minimal immersed spheres in homotopy class constructed by Sacks and Uhlembeck in \cite{SaU}, in situations when they do not exist). Moreover, for every A>0 we minimize the Willmore functional among connected families of weak, possibly branched, immersions of the 2-sphere having prescribed total area equal to A and we prove full regularity for the minimizer. Finally, under a mild curvature condition on (M^m,h), we minimize the sum of the area with the square of the L^2 norm of the second fundamental form, among weak possibly branched immersions of the two sphere and we prove the regularity of the minimizer.Comment: 58 page