A note about the Veronese cone (Q1892741)

The Veronese surface is a minimally embedded real projective plane in the standard 4-sphere. The authors give an elementary description of this surface. The Veronese cone is the set of line segments from the origin to the Veronese surface. The Veronese cone is known to be a minimal surface, except of course at the singularity at the origin, but it is not known whether it is area minimizing. The authors prove that if any surface, \(S\), meaning an integral current modulo 2, has the same boundary as the Veronese cone and if the portion of \(S\) lying near the cone satisfies an orientability condition called L-orientability, then \(S\) has larger area than the Veronese cone. In a previous paper, the second author had constructed a twist-calibration on the double cover of the complement of the antipodal image of the unbounded Veronese cone. That previous construction implied that comparison surfaces that do not cross that antipodal image have larger area than the Veronese cone, provided also that the L-orientability condition is satisfied. The advance in this paper is to replace the original calibration by a vanishing calibration, thereby removing the restriction on crossing the antipodal image. The idea is to replace a calibration \(\omega\) by \(d(g\psi)\), where \(g\) is a real valued function vanishing outside some neighborhood and \(\psi\) is a form with \(\omega= d\psi\). Both, \(g\) and \(\psi\) must be well chosen. In this instance, a combination of analysis and computer assistance was employed to obtain \(g\).