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

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.