First variation of anisotropic energies and crystalline mean curvature for partitions (Q1423989)

The authors rigorously derive the notion of crystalline mean curvature of an anisotropic partition (junction). As the main result (valid in any dimension) it is shown that the mean curvature of a crystalline partition is the tangential divergence of the Cahn-Hoffmann vector field minimizing \(\int_{T}(\text{div}_{\tau}N)^{2} \,d{\mathcal P}_{\varphi}\) among suitable comparison fields. In a final section examples are presented, where the crystalline mean curvature is explicitely computed.