Existence and structure of solutions for general $P$-area minimizing surface

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence and structure of solutions for a broad class of $P$-area minimization problems, unifying previous results and introducing a vector field characterization for minimizers.

Contribution

It introduces a vector field $N$ that characterizes all minimizers and generalizes existing results on least gradient and $P$-area minimizing surfaces.

Findings

Existence of solutions under barrier conditions.

Characterization of minimizers via a vector field $N$.

Unification of various prior results in the literature.

Abstract

We study existence and structure of solutions to the Dirichlet and Neumann boundary problems associated with minimizers of the functional $I(u)=\int_{\Omega} (\phi(x, D u + F)+Hu) \, dx$, where $\phi (x, \xi)$, among other properties, is convex and homogeneous of degree $1$ with respect to $\xi$. We show that there exists an underlying vector field $N$ that characterizes the existence and structure of all minimizers. We also investigate existence of solutions under the barrier condition on $\partial \Omega$. The results in this paper generalize and unify many results in the literature about existence of minimizers of least gradient problems and $P-$area minimizing surfaces.