Minimal immersions of spheres into spheres

Abstract

In this paper we announce a qualitative description of an important class of closed n-dimensional submanifolds of the m-dimensional sphere, namely, those which locally minimize the n-area in the same way that geodesics minimize the arc length and are themselves locally n-spheres of constant radius r; those r that may appear are called admissible. It is known that for n = 2 each admissible r determines a unique element of the above class. The main result here is that for each n >/= 3 and each admissible r >/= [unk]8 there exists a continuum of distinct such submanifolds.