Related papers: Soap films with gravity and almost-minimal surface…
The Alexandrov Soap Bubble Theorem asserts that the distance spheres are the only embedded closed connected hypersurfaces in space forms having constant mean curvature. The theorem can be extended to more general functions of the principal…
We study the Plateau problem with a lower dimensional obstacle in $\mathbb{R}^n$. Intuitively, in $\mathbb{R}^3$ this corresponds to a soap film (spanning a given contour) that is pushed from below by a "vertical" 2D half-space (or some…
We prove a smooth compactness theorem for the space of elasticae, unless the limit curve is a straight segment. As an application, we obtain smooth stability results for minimizers with respect to clamped boundary data.
The thickness of freshly made soap films is usually in the micron range, and interference colors make thickness fluctuations easily visible. Circular patterns of constant thickness are commonly observed, either a thin film disc in a thicker…
"The Life of a Free Soap Film" is a fluid dynamics video for the Gallery of Fluid Motion intended to showcase the novel experimental techniques that we have developed in our laboratory to study the retraction of planar liquid films of…
A soap film, or a flexible membrane without bending and torsional stiffness, that is confined in a cylinder is shown to be susceptible to a surface-tension-driven instability when it is stretched or twisted. This leads to its breakdown and…
We use theory and numerical computation to determine the shape of an axisymmetric fluid membrane with a resistance to bending and constant area. The membrane connects two rings in the classic geometry that produces a catenoidal shape in a…
We show that any compact surface of genus zero in Euclidean 3-space that satisfies a quasiconformal inequality between its principal curvatures is a round sphere. This solves an old open problem by H. Hopf, and gives a spherical version of…
Let (M,g) be a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary. This paper is concerned with the set of scalar-flat metrics which are in the conformal class of g and have the boundary as a constant mean curvature hypersurface. We prove that this…
What are the possible shapes of various things and why? For instance, when a closed wire or a frame is dipped into a soap solution and is raised up from the solution, the surface spanning the wire is a soap film. What are the possible…
We consider compact connected minimal surfaces, with a pair of boundary curves (not necessarily convex) in distinct planes, that have least-area amongst all orientable surfaces with the same boundary. When the planes containing these two…
Vacuum quasi-topological gravity with infinitely many terms in the action satisfies Markov's limiting curvature hypothesis: the spherically symmetric solutions are regular and all curvature invariants are bounded by solution-independent…
Given a sequence of properly embedded minimal surfaces in a $3$-manifold with local bounds on area and genus, we prove subsequential convergence, smooth away from a discrete set, to a smooth embedded limit surface, possibly with…
In this paper, we prove that every conformal minimal immersion of a compact bordered Riemann surface $M$ into a minimally convex domain $D\subset \mathbb{R}^3$ can be approximated, uniformly on compacts in $\mathring M=M\setminus bM$, by…
We investigate compactness phenomena involving free boundary minimal hypersurfaces in Riemannian manifolds of dimension less than eight. We provide natural geometric conditions that ensure strong one-sheeted graphical subsequential…
Alexandrov's Soap Bubble theorem dates back to $1958$ and states that a compact embedded hypersurface in $\mathbb{R}^N$ with constant mean curvature must be a sphere. For its proof, A.D. Alexandrov invented his reflection priciple. In…
The solution to the Euler-Lagrange equation is an extremal functional.To understand that the functional is stationary at local extrema (maxima or minima), we propose a physics experiment that involves using soap film to form a catenoid. A…
A field theory to describe electrostatic interactions in soap films, described by electric multi-layers with a generalized thermodynamic surface-charging mechanism, is studied. In the limit where the electrostatic interactions are weak this…
We characterize all compact embedded stable minimal capillary surfaces with capillary angle close to either $0$ or $\pi$ that are supported on a complete embedded minimal surface with finite total curvature that is not an affine plane.…
Cox & Jones recently devised and studied an interesting variant of the classical Plateau problem, a variant in which a helical soap film is confined to a cylindrical tube with circular cross-section. Through experiments, numerics, and some…