Local minimizers of the Willmore functional
Florian Skorzinski · Analysis · 2014
Abstract Since the Willmore functional is invariant with respect to conformal transformations and reparametrizations, the kernel of the second derivative of the functional at a critical point will always contain a subspace generated by these transformations. We prove that the second derivative being positive definite outside this space is a sufficient condition for a critical point to be a local minimizer.