Minimal surfaces of least total curvature and moduli spaces of plane polygonal arcs (Q1277086): Difference between revisions

The authors' main result is the existence, for each \(p\geq 0\), of minimally immersed Riemann surfaces in \(E^3\) of genus \(p\), with one Enneper-type end, and with total curvature \(-4\pi(p+1)\), i.e., these surfaces minimize the total curvature for their genus. Although examples for genus zero (Enneper's surface) and genus one (the Chen-Gackstatter surface) have been known for a while, this work extends the theory to general \(p\), also supporting recent experimental evidence found by \textit{E. Thayer} [``Complete minimal surfaces in Euclidean 3-space'', Ph.D thesis (1994)] for \(p\leq 35\). As the authors state, their approach is novel: they apply results from Teichmüller theory and results about zigzags to prove the existence of Weierstraß data for the minimal surfaces. Results from Teichmüller theory are applied (in sections 4 and 5) to obtain the existence of a reflexive, symmetric zigzag of genus \(p\), for \(p\geq 0\), which is isolated in the space \({\mathcal Z}_p\) of all possible symmetric zigzags of genus \(p\). Although the definition of a zigzag requires that the open, properly embedded arc \(C\) has alternating horizontal and vertical arcs, i.e., the angles between consecutive edges are \(\pi/2\) or \(3\pi/2\), the authors note that the theory presented in sections 4 and 5 also holds for non-orthogonal zigzags. At the end of section 5, a discussion regarding the choice of a height function can be found -- the authors show that it is necessary to have a height function that is proper on \({\mathcal Z}_p\), justifying their choice in definition 4.3. After obtaining the existence of an isolated, reflexive, symmetric zigzag of genus \(p\) in \({\mathcal Z}_p\), it follows (due to the theory presented in section 3) that there exists a minimally immersed Riemann surface in \(E^3\) of genus \(p\), with one Enneper-type end, and with total curvature \(-4\pi(p+1)\). In section 3, the authors show how to obtain two Riemann surfaces, \(R_{NE}\) and \(R_{SW}\), from the zigzag \(Z_p\). The Weierstraß data is then defined using these Riemann surfaces by using the vertices of the zigzag to write down the divisors of meromorphic one-forms that are then used to write the Weierstraß data. It is remarked that the surfaces constructed have at most eight self-isometries. Although the methods in sections 4 and 5 apply to non-orthogonal zigzags, the methods in section 3 rely on having an orthogonal zigzag. The paper concludes with a nice extension of the method to show the existence of minimally immersed surfaces \(M_{p,k}\) of genus \(p(k-1)\) with one Enneper-type end with winding order \(2k-1\), the Karcher-Thayer surfaces.