A new family of minimal surfaces of even genus in the three-dimensional sphere

We discover a family of closed, embedded minimal surfaces in the three-dimensional round sphere which includes new examples with low genus. The existence proof relies on an equivariant min-max procedure applied to a novel sweepout which is constructed by fusing the equatorial sphere with the Clifford torus. We determine the full symmetry groups of our surfaces, prove lower bounds on their Morse indices, and show that they are geometrically distinct from all previously known examples.