Existence of generalized totally umbilic 2-spheres in perturbed 3-spheres

It was recently shown by Souam and Toubiana [34] that the (nonconstantly curved) Berger spheres do not contain totally umbilic surfaces. Nevertheless, in this article we show, by perturbative arguments, that all analytic metrics sufficiently close to the round metric g0 on possess generalized totally umbilic 2-spheres, namely critical points of the conformal Willmore functional. The same is true in the smooth setting provided a suitable nondegeneracy condition on the traceless Ricci tensor holds. The proof involves a gluing process of two different finite-dimensional reduction schemes, a sharp asymptotic analysis of the functional on perturbed umbilic spheres of small radius and a quantitative Schur-type Lemma in order to treat the cases when the traceless Ricci tensor of the perturbation is degenerate but not identically zero. For left-invariant metrics on, our result implies the existence of uncountably many distinct Willmore spheres.