English

Graphical Willmore Problems with Low-Regularity Boundary and Dirichlet Data

Analysis of PDEs 2025-09-26 v1

Abstract

We establish existence and regularity results for boundary value problems arising from the first variation of the Willmore energy in the graphical setting. Our focus lies on two-dimensional surfaces with fixed clamped boundary conditions, embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space, and represented as graphs of height functions over domains with non-smooth boundaries. Our approach involves constructing solutions through linearization and a fixed-point argument, requiring small boundary data in suitable functional spaces. Building on the results of Koch and Lamm \cite{koch2012geometric}, we rewrite the Willmore equation for graphs in a divergence form that allows the application of weighted second-order Sobolev spaces. This reformulation significantly weakens the regularity assumptions on both the boundary and the Dirichlet data, reducing them to the C1+αC^{1+\alpha}-class, while the solution remains smooth in the interior. Moreover, we extend the existence theory to domains with merely Lipschitz boundaries within a purely weighted Sobolev framework. Our approach is also applicable to other higher-order geometric PDEs, including the graphical Helfrich and surface diffusion equations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.21018,
  title  = {Graphical Willmore Problems with Low-Regularity Boundary and Dirichlet Data},
  author = {Boris Gulyak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21018},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:55:53.289Z