Stable anisotropic capillary hypersurfaces in a wedge

Abstract

We study a variational problem for hypersurfaces in a wedge in the Euclidean space. Our wedge is bounded by a finitely many hyperplanes passing a common point. The total energy of each hypersurface is the sum of its anisotropic surface energy and the wetting energy of the planar domain bounded by the boundary of the considered hypersurface. An anisotropic surface energy is a generalization of the surface area which was introduced to model the surface tension of a small crystal. We show an existence and uniqueness result of local minimizers of the total energy among hypersurfaces enclosing the same volume. Our result is new even when the special case where the surface energy is the surface area.

Keywords

• wulff shape
• capillary surface
• anisotropic surface energy
• constant anisotropic mean curvature
• stable
• wetting energy