Minimal surfaces of least total curvature and moduli spaces of plane polygonal arcs (Q1277086)

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.