A calculus for conformal hypersurfaces and new higher Willmore energy functionals

Abstract

Abstract The invariant theory for conformal hypersurfaces is studied by treating these as the conformal infinity of a conformally compact manifold. Recently it has been shown how, given a conformal hypersurface embedding, a distinguished ambient metric is found (within its conformal class) by solving a singular version of the Yamabe problem [21]. This enables a route to proliferating conformal hypersurface invariants. The aim of this work is to give a self contained and explicit treatment of the calculus and identities required to use this machinery in practice. In addition we show how to compute the solution’s asymptotics. We also develop the calculus for explicitly constructing the conformal hypersurface invariant differential operators discovered in [21] and in particular how to compute extrinsically coupled analogues of conformal Laplacian powers. Our methods also enable the study of integrated conformal hypersurface invariants and their functional variations. As a main application we prove that a class of energy functions proposed in a recent work have the right properties to be deemed higher-dimensional analogues of the Willmore energy. This complements recent progress on the existence and construction of different functionals in [22] and [20].