Minimal surfaces over stars

A JS surface is a minimal graph over a polygonal domain that becomes infinite in magnitude at the domain boundary. Jenkins and Serrin characterized the existence of these minimal graphs in terms of the signs of the boundary values and the side-lengths of the polygon. For a convex polygon, there can be essentially only one JS surface, but a non-convex domain may admit several distinct JS surfaces. We consider two families of JS surfaces corresponding to different boundary values, namely JS₀ and JS₁, over domains in the form of regular stars. We give parameterizations for these surfaces as lifts of harmonic maps, and observe that all previously constructed JS surfaces have been of type JS₀. We give an example of a JS₁ surface that is a new complete embedded minimal surface generalizing Scherk's doubly periodic surface, and show also that the JS₀ surface over a regular convex 2n-gon is the limit of JS₁ surfaces over non-convex stars. Finally we consider the construction of other JS surfaces over stars that belong neither to JS₀ nor to JS₁.