Critical weak immersed Surfaces within Sub-manifolds of the Teichm\"uller Space

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties of critical points of geometric energies like area and Willmore energy for surfaces constrained within sub-manifolds of Teichmüller space, establishing regularity and existence results for minimizers.

Contribution

It proves that constrained critical points satisfy Euler-Lagrange equations and that minimizers are smooth surfaces under specific conditions, extending previous compactness results.

Findings

Critical points satisfy constrained Euler-Lagrange equations.

Critical points are smooth away from isolated branched points.

Existence of smooth Willmore minimizers under certain conditions.

Abstract

We prove that the critical points of various energies such as the area, the Willmore energy, the frame energy for tori...etc among possibly branched immersions constrained to evolve within a smooth sub-manifold of the Teichm\"uller space satisfy the corresponding constrained Euler Lagrange equation. We deduce that critical points of the Willmore energy or the frame energy for tori are smooth analytic surfaces, away possibly from isolated branched points, under the condition that either the genus is at most 2 or if the sub-manifold does not intersect the subspace of hyper-elliptic points. Using a compactness result from a previous work of the author, we can conclude that each closed sub-manifold of the Teichm\"uller space, including points, under the previous assumptions, posses a possibly branched smooth Willmore minimizer satisfying the conformal-constrained Willmore equation.