Minimising a relaxed Willmore functional for graphs subject to boundary conditions

TL;DR

This paper studies the minimization of the Willmore functional for graphs with boundary conditions, establishing bounds, relaxation properties, and existence results for minimizers, including extensions to more general curvature energies.

Contribution

It introduces the $L^1$-relaxation of the Willmore functional for graphs, characterizes functions with finite relaxed energy, and proves existence of minimizers under boundary conditions.

Findings

Bounds for Willmore energy imply area and diameter bounds.

The $L^1$-relaxation is the largest lower semicontinuous extension.

Existence of minimizers in $L^ty \cap BV$ is established.

Abstract

For a bounded smooth domain in the plane and smooth boundary data we consider the minimisation of the Willmore functional for graphs subject to Dirichlet or Navier boundary conditions. For $H^2$-regular graphs we show that bounds for the Willmore energy imply area and diameter bounds. We then consider the $L^1$-lower semicontinuous relaxation of the Willmore functional, which is shown to be indeed its largest possible extension, and characterise properties of functions with finite relaxed energy. In particular, we deduce compactness and lower-bound estimates for energy-bounded sequences. The lower bound is given by a functional that describes the contribution by the regular part of the graph and is defined for a suitable subset of $BV(\Omega)$. We further show that finite relaxed Willmore energy implies the attainment of the Dirichlet boundary data in an appropriate sense, and obtain the existence of a minimiser in $L^\infty\cap BV$ for the relaxed energy. Finally, we extend our results to Navier boundary conditions and more general curvature energies of Canham-Helfrich type.