A gluing construction for prescribed mean curvature (Q627395)

The purpose of this paper is to use the gluing technique to construct hypersurfaces in Euclidean space having approximately constant prescribed mean curvature. These surfaces are perturbations of unions of finitely many spheres of the same radius assembled end-to-end along a line segment. Let \(F:{{\mathbb R}^{n+1}}\times T{{\mathbb R}^{n+1}}\to {\mathbb R} \) be a given, fixed smooth function. We assume that \(F\) has cylindrical symmetry in the following sense: Endow \({{\mathbb R}^{n+1}}\) with coordinates \((x^0, x^1,\dots x^n)\), and let \(G\subseteq O(n+1)\) be the set of orthogonal transformations that fix the \(x^0\)-axis. Each rotation \(R\in G\) acts on \(T{{\mathbb R}^{n+1}}\) via the differential \(R_{\star}:T{{\mathbb R}^{n+1}}\to T{{\mathbb R}^{n+1}} \). For \(R\in G\), we demand that \(F(R(p), R_{\star}V_p)=F(p, V_p)\) for all \((p, V_p)\in T{{\mathbb R}^{n+1}}\). The prescribed mean curvature problem, that is solved in this paper, is to find a \(G\)-invariant hyperurface \(\Sigma_r\), for every sufficiently small \(r\in {\mathbb R}_+\), which satisfies the prescribed mean curvature equation \(H[\Sigma_r](p)=2+r^2F(p, N_{\Sigma_r}(p))\), for all \(p\in \Sigma_r\), where \(H[\Sigma_r]\) is the mean curvature of \(\Sigma_r\) and \(N_{\Sigma_r}\) is the unit normal vector field of \(\Sigma_r\).