Sufficient conditions for capillary surfaces to be energy minima (Q1587545)

A capillary surface is, roughly speaking, the free boundary of a liquid drop sitting on a solid surface. In the absense of gravity, it is a stationary point of the energy functional \(|\Sigma|-c|\Sigma_1|\), where \(\Sigma\) is the free boundary part of the drop, \(\Sigma_1\) is the wetted region on the solid surface, and \(c\in(-1,1)\) is a material constant. The present paper is concerned with the question when a given stationary configuration actually represents a minimum of the energy. The main result contains sufficient conditions for strict local minimality, involving the eigenvalues of the operator \(-\Delta-|S|^2\), where \(S\) is the second fundamental form of the surface (under ``capillary'' boundary restrictions). Local minimality here is to be understood in a constrained sense. The space of admissible perturbations of the surface is first defined in terms of graphs of functions in curvilinear coordinates and then related to perturbations of capillary surfaces which are uniformly small and have uniformly small derivatives.