Stability of axial free-boundary hyperplanes in circular cones

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability of free-boundary minimal surfaces in convex cones, showing instability in 2D but stability in higher dimensions with large aperture, using a novel Lipschitz flow and functional inequalities.

Contribution

It introduces a new Lipschitz flow for deformations of free-boundary minimal surfaces and establishes stability criteria depending on the cone's aperture and dimension.

Findings

In 2D, the surface is always unstable.

For dimensions ≥ 3 and large aperture, the surface is strictly stable.

The stability analysis connects second variation with functional inequalities.

Abstract

Given an axially-symmetric, $(n+1)$-dimensional convex cone $\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$, we study the stability of the free-boundary minimal surface $\Sigma$ obtained by intersecting $\Omega$ with a $n$-plane that contains the axis of $\Omega$. In the case $n=2$, $\Sigma$ is always unstable, as a special case of the vertex-skipping property that we recently proved in another article. Conversely, as soon as $n \ge 3$ and $\Omega$ has a sufficiently large aperture (depending on the dimension $n$), we show that $\Sigma$ is strictly stable. For our stability analysis, we introduce a Lipschitz flow $\Sigma_{t}[f]$ of deformations of $\Sigma$ associated with a compactly-supported, scalar deformation field $f$, which satisfies the key property $\partial \Sigma_{t}[f] \subset \partial \Omega$ for all $t\in \mathbb{R}$. Then, we compute the lower-right second variation of the area of $\Sigma$ along the flow, and ultimately show that it is positive by exploiting its connection with a functional inequality studied in the context of reaction-diffusion problems.