Geometric rigidity for sequences of W^{2,2} conformal immersions

We analyse sequences of discs conformally immersed in $ \mathbb{R }^ n$ with energy $ \int _{ D} |A_k |^ 2 \le \gamma _n$ , where $ \gamma _n = 8\pi $ if $ n=3$ and $ \gamma _n = 4 \pi $ when $n\ge 4$ . We show that if such sequences do not weakly converge to a conformal immersion, then by a sequence of dilations we obtain a complete minimal surface with bounded total curvature, either Enneper’s minimal surface if $ n=3$ or Chen’s minimal graph if $ n \ge 4$ . In the papers, (Kuwert and Li, Comm Anal Geom 20(2), 313–340, 2012; Rivière, Adv Calculus Variations 6(1), 1–31, 2013) it was shown that if a sequence of immersed tori diverges in moduli space then $\liminf _ {k\rightarrow \infty } \mathcal W ( f_k )\ge 8\pi $ . We apply the above analysis to show that in $ \mathbb{R }^3$ if the sequence diverges so that $ \lim _{ k \rightarrow \infty } \mathcal W (f_k) =8\pi $ then there exists a sequence of Möbius transforms $ \sigma _{k}$ such that $ \sigma _k\circ f _k$ converges weakly to a catenoid.