Free boundary and capillary minimal surfaces in spherical caps II: Low energy
Differential Geometry
2025-12-25 v1
Abstract
This is the second of two articles in which we investigate the geometry of free boundary and capillary minimal surfaces in balls . In this article, we find monotonicity formulae which imply that capillary minimal surfaces maximise a certain modified energy in their conformal orbit (preserving ). In the hemisphere, this energy is precisely the capillary energy. We also prove a partial characterisation by index for capillary minimal surfaces in the hemisphere, analogous to Urbano's characterisation of the Clifford torus.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.20857,
title = {Free boundary and capillary minimal surfaces in spherical caps II: Low energy},
author = {Jonathan J. Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.20857},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
49 pages, 2 figures; comments welcome!