Discrete Yamabe problem for polyhedral surfaces

Three-dimensional polytopes (52B10) Circle packings and discrete conformal geometry (52C26) Discrete differential geometry (53A70) General geometric structures on low-dimensional manifolds (57M50)

Abstract: We study a new discretization of the Gaussian curvature for polyhedral surfaces. This discrete Gaussian curvature is defined on each conical singularity of a polyhedral surface as the quotient of the angle defect and the area of the Voronoi cell corresponding to the singularity. We divide polyhedral surfaces into discrete conformal classes using a generalization of discrete conformal equivalence pioneered by Feng Luo. We subsequently show that, in every discrete conformal class, there exists a polyhedral surface with constant discrete Gaussian curvature. We also provide explicit examples to demonstrate that this surface is in general not unique.

Review text

The Yamabe problem asks whether every closed Riemannian manifold is conformally equivalent to one with constant scalar curvature. For 2-dimensional manifolds the scalar and the Gaussian curvature are equivalent, and thus the Yamabe problem is answered by the Poincaré-Koebe uniformization theorem, which states that any closed oriented Riemannian surface is conformally equivalent to one with constant Gaussian curvature. The discrete Yamabe problem asks whether for every PL-metric there exists a discrete conformally equivalent one with constant discrete Gaussian curvature. The main result of the paper is that for every PL-metric \(d\) on a marked surface \((S, V)\), there exists a discrete conformally equivalent PL-metric \(\widetilde{d}\) such that the piecewise flat surface \((S,V,\widetilde{d})\) has constant discrete Gaussian curvature. The author uses the following notation. A piecewise flat surface is a triple \((S,V,d)\), where \(S\) is the underlying topological surface, \(d\) denotes a piecewise linear metric (PL-metric, for short), and \(V\subset S\) is a finite set containing the conical singularities of \(d\). The cone angle at a point \(i\in V\) is denoted by \(\alpha_i\), and the angle defect \(2\pi-\alpha_i\) is denoted by \(W_i\). The discrete Gaussian curvature at a point \(i\in V\) is defined as the quotient of the angle defect \(W_i\) and the area \(A_i\) of the Voronoi cell of \(i\) and is denoted by \(K_i\), i.e., \(K_i=W_i/A_i\). The Voronoi cell of a point \(i\in V\) consists of all points on the piecewise flat surface \((S,V,d)\) that are as close or closer to \(i\) than to any other point in \(V\). Two PL-metrics on a surface with a fixed triangulation are discrete conformally equivalent if their edge lengths \(\ell, \widetilde{\ell}: E\to \mathbb{R}_{>0}\) are related by the conformal factor \(u:V\to\mathbb{R}\) according to the formula \(\widetilde{\ell}_{ij} = \ell_{ij}\exp(\frac12 u_i + \frac12 u_j)\), which is a straightforward discretization of the conformal equivalence of smooth surfaces. \par The proof is variational in nature. The author translates the problem into a non-convex optimization problem with inequality constraints, and solves the latter using a classical theorem from calculus. She also provides explicit examples to show that the PL-metric \(\widetilde{d}\) of constant curvature is, in general, not unique.

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