Doubling Constant Mean Curvature Tori in the 3-Sphere

Abstract

The Clifford tori in the 3-sphere are a one-parameter family of flat, two-dimensional, constant mean curvature (CMC) surfaces. This paper demonstrates that new, topologically non-trivial CMC surfaces resembling a pair of neighbouring Clifford tori connected at a sub-lattice consisting of at least two points by small catenoidal bridges can be constructed by perturbative PDE methods. That is, one can create an approximate solution by gluing a rescaled catenoid into the neighbourhood of each sub-lattice point; and then one can show that a perturbation of this approximate submanifold exists which satisfies the CMC condition.