Free boundary minimal hypersurfaces with spherical boundary

We first prove that a compact embedded minimal annulus in meeting two concentric spheres perpendicularly along the boundaries is part of a plane. We also prove that an embedded minimal hypersurface lying outside of a ball is part of either a catenoid or a hyperplane if it is perpendicular to the sphere along the boundary and has only one end that is asymptotic to either a catenoid if , or a hyperplane if .     

Willmore energy for joining of carbon nanostructures

Numerous types of carbon nanostructure have been found experimentally, including nanotubes, fullerenes and nanocones. These structures have applications in various nanoscale devices and the joining of these structures may lead to further new configurations with more remarkable properties and applications. The join profile between different carbon nanostructures in a symmetric configuration may be modelled using the calculus of variations. In previous studies, carbon nanostructures were assumed to deform according to perfect elasticity, thus the elastic energy, depending only on the axial curvature, was used to determine the join profile consisting of a finite number of discrete bonds. However, one could argue that the relevant energy should also involve the rotational curvature, especially when its size is comparable to the axial curvature. In this paper, we use the Willmore energy, a natural generalisation of the elastic energy that depends on both the axial and rotational curvatures. Catenoids are absolute minimisers of this energy and pieces of these may be used to join various nanostructures. We focus on the cases of joining a fullerene to a nanotube and joining two fullerenes along a common axis. By comparing our results with the earlier work, we find that both energies give similar joining profiles. Further work on other configurations may reveal which energy provides a better model.     

Immersions of Finite Geometric Type in Euclidean Spaces

In this paper, we introduce the class of hypersurfaces of finitegeometric type. They are defined as the ones that share the basicdifferential topological properties of minimal surfaces of finite totalcurvature. We extend to surfaces in this class the classical theorem ofOsserman on the number of omitted points of the Gauss mapping ofcomplete minimal surfaces of finite total curvature. We give aclassification of the even-dimensional catenoids as the only even-dimensional minimal hypersurfaces of R ⁿ of finite geometric type.     

Catenoidal Layers for the Allen-Cahn Equation in Bounded Domains

This paper presents a new family of solutions to the singularly perturbed Allen-Cahn equation α~2Δu + u(1- u~2) = 0 in a smooth bounded domain Ω R~3, with Neumann boundary condition and α 0 a small parameter. These solutions have the property that as α→ 0, their level sets collapse onto a bounded portion of a complete embedded minimal surface with finite total curvature intersecting ?Ω orthogonally and that is non-degenerate respect to ?Ω. The authors provide explicit examples of surfaces to which the result applies.