The Willmore Energy Landscape of Spheres and Avoidable Singularities of the Willmore Flow

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the energy landscape of immersed 2-spheres in 3D space, classifies initial surfaces with energy up to 12π regarding singularities, and extends inequalities related to Willmore energy.

Contribution

It provides a classification of spheres with energy up to 12π based on their singularity behavior and introduces new techniques for analyzing the Willmore flow.

Findings

Immersions with energy ≤ 12π form four regular homotopy classes.

In certain classes, all Willmore flow singularities are avoidable.

Extended Li-Yau inequality at 12π for immersed spheres without triple points.

Abstract

We study the sublevel sets of the Willmore energy on the space of smoothly immersed $ 2 $-spheres in Euclidean $ 3 $-space. We show that the subset of immersions with energy at most $ 12\pi $ consists of four regular homotopy classes. Moreover, we show that in certain regular homotopy classes, all singularities of the Willmore flow are avoidable, that is, the initial surface admits a regular homotopy to a round sphere whose Willmore energy does not exceed that of the initial surface. This yields a classification of initial surfaces with energy at most $ 12\pi $ that lead to unavoidable singularities. As a further consequence, we obtain an extension of the Li-Yau inequality at $ 12\pi $ for a large class of immersed spheres without triple points. To prove these results, we glue together different instances of the Willmore flow and employ an invariant for triple-point-free immersed spheres.