Sliding stability and uniqueness for the set YXY

TL;DR

This paper proves that the 2-dimensional minimal cone YXY in R4 is both sliding stable and unique, resolving a key open problem and enabling the construction of new minimal cones through unions.

Contribution

It establishes the sliding stability and uniqueness of the YXY minimal cone, previously unresolved, facilitating the generation of new minimal cones via unions.

Findings

YXY is Almgren sliding stable.

YXY is Almgren unique.

YXY is topologically sliding stable and unique for Z2.

Abstract

This article is dedicated to discuss the sliding stability and the uniqueness property for the 2-dimensional minimal cone YXY in R4. This problem is motivated by the classification of singularities for Almgren minimal sets, a model for Plateau's problem in the setting of sets. Minimal cones are blow up limits of Almgren minimal sets, thus the list of all minimal cones gives all possible types of singularities that can occur for minimal sets. As proved in [16], when several 2-dimensional Almgren (resp. topological) minimal cones are Almgren (resp. topological) sliding stable, and Almgren (resp. topological) unique, the almost orthogonal union of them stays minimal. Hence if several minimal cones admit sliding stability and uniqueness properties, then we can use their almost orthogonal unions to generate new families of minimal cones. One then naturally ask which minimal cones admit these two properties. Among all the known 2-dimensional minimal cones, YXY is the only one whose stability and uniqueness properties were left unsolved. We give affirmative answers to this problem for the stability and uniqueness properties for YXY in this paper: we prove that the set YXY is both Almgren sliding stable, and Almgren unique; for the topological case, we prove its topological sliding stability and topological uniqueness for the coefficient group Z2. This result, along with the results in [16, 18, 17], allows us to use all the known 2-dimensional minimal cones to generate new 2-dimensional minimal cones by taking almost orthogonal unions.