Willmore minmax surfaces and the cost of the sphere eversion

Abstract

We develop a general minmax procedure in Euclidian spaces for constructing Willmore surfaces of non-zero indices. We apply this procedure to the Willmore minmax sphere eversion in the 3-dimensional Euclidian space. We compute the cost of sphere eversion in terms of Willmore energies of the Willmore spheres in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$.