New Examples of Willmore Surfaces in S ⁿ

Abstract

A surface x: M → S ⁿ is called a Willmore surface if it is a criticalsurface of the Willmore functional ∫ _M (S − 2H ²)dv, where H isthe mean curvature and S is the square of the length of the secondfundamental form. It is well known that any minimal surface is aWillmore surface. The first nonminimal example of a flat Willmoresurface in higher codimension was obtained by Ejiri. This example whichcan be viewed as a tensor product immersion of S ¹(1) and a particularsmall circle in S ²(1), and therefore is contained in S ⁵(1) gives anegative answer to a question by Weiner. In this paper we generalize theabove mentioned example by investigating Willmore surfaces in S ⁿ(1)which can be obtained as a tensor product immersion of two curves. We inparticular show that in this case too, one of the curves has to beS ¹(1), whereas the other one is contained either in S ²(1) or in S ³(1). In the first case, we explicitly determine the immersion interms of elliptic functions, thus constructing infinetely many newnonminimal flat Willmore surfaces in S ⁵. Also in the latter casewe explicitly include examples.