On the global structure of crystalline surfaces (Q2276765)

The author considers a crystalline material whose surface energy density per unit area is a function \(\Phi\) over the direction sphere \(S^ 2\) which is such that its Wulff shape W is polyhedral. Here W is the intersection of all the half spaces \(\{x:\;x\cdot \nu \leq \Phi (\nu),\quad \nu \in S^ 2\}.\) She establishes the following upper bound for the number of interior corners in a crystalline minimal surface S which is polyhedral and has a polygonal boundary: \((1+A/a+\pi /A)(N_ B- 2\chi (S)),\) where \(N_ B\) is the number of segments in the boundary of S, \(\chi\) (S) is the Euler characteristic of S and a, A are the minimal and maximal areas in the decomposition of \(S^ 2\) into spherical polygons by the generalized Gauss map of W. The bound requires certain assumptions on S, too complicated to describe here. The author proves a much better bound using more information about the boundary of S and the structure of S along that boundary as well as similar bounds on the number of plane segments in S.