Concentration of small Willmore spheres in Riemannian 3-manifolds

Abstract

Given a 3-dimensional Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$, we prove that if $(\Phi_k)$ is a sequence of Willmore spheres (or more generally area-constrained Willmore spheres), having Willmore energy bounded above uniformly strictly by $8 \pi$, and Hausdorff converging to a point $\bar{p}\in M$, then $Scal(\bar{p})=0$ and $\nabla Scal(\bar{p})=0$ (resp. $\nabla Scal(\bar{p})=0$). Moreover, a suitably rescaled sequence smoothly converges, up to subsequences and reparametrizations, to a round sphere in the euclidean 3-dimensional space. This generalizes previous results of Lamm and Metzger contained in \cite{LM1}-\cite{LM2}. An application to the Hawking mass is also established.