The Helfrich boundary value problem (Q1755650)

This paper deals with branched Helfrich immersions that satisfy Dirichlet boundary conditions and with a finite number of branch points. The main contribution of this paper is a lower semicontinuity result with respect to oriented varifold convergence for the Helfrich energy and a minimising sequence. The basic idea is to analyze the Helfrich energy for oriented varifolds. This is essentially done by using variational arguments.