Volume 10, Issue 4

Using the classical approach we show the existence of disc type solutions to the asymptotic Plateau problem in certain Hadamard manifolds which may have arbitrarily strong curvature and volume growth.

We use the minimizing movement theory to study the gradient flow associated to a non-regular relaxation of a geometric functional derived from the Willmore energy. Thanks to the coarea formula, we can define a Willmore energy on regular functions of L1L^{1}(ℝd\mathbb{R}^{d}). This functional is extended to every L1{L^{1}} function by taking its lower semicontinuous envelope. We study the flow generated by this relaxed energy for radially non-increasing functions (functions with balls as superlevel sets). In the first part of the paper, we prove a coarea formula for the relaxed energy of such functions. Then, we show that the flow consists of an erosion of the initial data. The erosion speed is given by a first order ordinary equation.

We present some new bounds for the first Robin eigenvalue with a negative boundary parameter. These include the constant volume problem, where the bounds are based on the shrinking coordinate method, and a proof that in the fixed perimeter case the disk maximises the first eigenvalue for all values of the parameter. This is in contrast with what happens in the constant area problem, where the disk is the maximiser only for small values of the boundary parameter. We also present sharp upper and lower bounds for the first eigenvalue of the ball and spherical shells. These results are complemented by the numerical optimisation of the first four and two eigenvalues in two and three dimensions, respectively, and an evaluation of the quality of the upper bounds obtained. We also study the bifurcations from the ball as the boundary parameter becomes large (negative).

We study Γ-convergence of nonconvex variational integrals of the calculus of variations in the setting of Cheeger–Sobolev spaces. Applications to relaxation and homogenization are given.

We show that in the setting of proper metric spaces one obtains a solution of the classical 2-dimensional Plateau problem by minimizing the energy, as in the classical case, once a definition of area has been chosen appropriately. We prove the quasi-convexity of this new definition of area. Under the assumption of a quadratic isoperimetric inequality we establish regularity results for energy minimizers and improve Hölder exponents of some area-minimizing discs.