A characterization of the Ejiri torus in $S^{5}$

Abstract

Ejiri's torus in $S^5$ is the first example of Willmore surface which is not conformally equivalent to any minimal surface in any space forms. Li and Vrancken classified all Willmore surfaces of tensor product in $S^{n}$ by reducing them into elastic curves in $S^3$, and the Ejiri torus appeared as a special example. In this paper, we first prove that among all Willmore tori of tensor product, the Willmore functional of the Ejiri torus in $S^5$ attains the minimum $2\pi^2\sqrt{3}$. Then we show that all Willmore tori of tensor product are unstable when the co-dimension is big enough. We also show that the Ejiri torus is unstable in $S^5$. Moreover, similar to Li and Vrancken, we classify all constrained Willmore surfaces of tensor product by reducing them with elastic curves in $S^3$. All constrained Willmore tori obtained this way are also shown to be unstable when the co-dimension is big enough. We conjecture that a Willmore torus having Willmore functional between $2\pi^2$ and $2\pi^2\sqrt{3}$ is either the Clifford torus, or the Ejiri torus.