English

The concept of varifold

Differential Geometry 2017-10-23 v4 Analysis of PDEs Classical Analysis and ODEs

Abstract

We survey - by means of 20 examples - the concept of varifold, as generalised submanifold, with emphasis on regularity of integral varifolds with mean curvature, while keeping prerequisites to a minimum. Integral varifolds are the natural language for studying the variational theory of the area integrand if one considers, for instance, existence or regularity of stationary (or, stable) surfaces of dimension at least three, or the limiting behaviour of sequences of smooth submanifolds under area and mean curvature bounds.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.05253,
  title  = {The concept of varifold},
  author = {Ulrich Menne},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.05253},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

The present text is a version with additional references but without figures of a note compiled for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. (v4: considerably expanded introduction, 6 pages)