Compactness and isotopy finiteness for submanifolds with uniformly bounded geometric curvature energies

Abstract

In this paper, we establish compactness for various geometric curvature energies including integral Menger curvature, and tangent-point repulsive potentials, defined a priori on the class of compact, embedded $m$-dimensional Lipschitz submanifolds in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$. It turns out that due to a smoothing effect any sequence of submanifolds with uniformly bounded energy contains a subsequence converging in $C^1$ to a limit submanifold. This result has two applications. The first one is an isotopy finiteness theorem: there are only finitely many isotopy types of such submanifolds below a given energy value, and we provide explicit bounds on the number of isotopy types in terms of the respective energy. The second one is the lower semicontinuity - with respect to Hausdorff-convergence of submanifolds - of all geometric curvature energies under consideration, which can be used to minimise each of these energies within prescribed isotopy classes.