The stability and instability of surfaces with prescribed mean curvature (Q2455233)

Let \(M^n\) be a noncompact connected orientable \(C^2\)-smooth hypersurface with a piecewise smooth boundary \(\partial M^n\) in the Euclidean space \(\mathbb{R}^{n+1}\). The author defines special functionals on a set \(\Gamma\) of such hypersurfaces with the property that their extremals are the hypersurfaces of \(\Gamma\) with prescribed mean curvature. An extremal hypersurface is said to be stable if the second variation of the corresponding functional is nonnegative definite. In this paper the author describes the properties of stable extremal hypersurfaces and obtains conditions under which an extremal hypersurface is stable or unstable.