On the Canham Problem: Bending Energy Minimizers for any Genus and Isoperimetric Ratio

Robert Kusner; Peter McGrath

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arXiv · 2104.10045

On the Canham Problem: Bending Energy Minimizers for any Genus and Isoperimetric Ratio

Robert Kusner·Peter McGrath

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Abstract

Building on work of Mondino-Scharrer, we show that among closed, smoothly embedded surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^3$ of genus $g$ and given isoperimetric ratio $v$, there exists one with minimum bending energy $\mathcal{W}$. We do this by gluing $g+1$ small catenoidal bridges to the bigraph of a singular solution for the linearized Willmore equation $\Delta (\Delta +2)\varphi=0$ on the $(g+1)$-punctured sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$ to construct a comparison surface of genus $g$ with arbitrarily small isoperimetric ratio $v\in (0, 1)$ and $\mathcal{W} < 8\pi$.

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BibTeX RIS

Robert Kusner, Peter McGrath. 2021-04-20. On the Canham Problem: Bending Energy Minimizers for any Genus and Isoperimetric Ratio. https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.10045

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