On the shape of capillarity droplets in a container (Q342998)

In this paper, the authors provide a quantitative description of capillarity droplets in a bounded container working in the classical setting of capillarity theory based on the minimization of Gauss free energy under a volume constraint. Capillarity phenomena are characterized by the dominance of the surface tension energy on the bulk/potential energy term. This is typically the case when the volume parameter \(m\) is suitably small with respect to the various data of the problem and then the surface energy is of order \(m^{(n-1)/n}>m\), while the potential energy is of order \(m\). In the case where a container \(A\) is present, the problem is to quantitatively describe the shape of global minimizers \(E_m\) of \((*)\,\gamma(m)=\inf\left\{{\mathcal E}\right\}\) in the small volume regime, where the energy functional \({\mathcal E}\) is defined as \({\mathcal E}(E)={\mathcal F}_{A,\sigma}(E)+\int\limits_Eg(x)dx\). The function \(g:A\to\mathbb R\) is a bounded potential energy density, and \({\mathcal F}_{A,\sigma}(E)={\mathcal H}^{n-1}(A\cap\partial E)+\int\limits_{\partial A\cap\partial E}\sigma d{\mathcal H}^{n-1}\) is the surface tension energy of the droplet, where \({\mathcal H}^{n-1}\) is the \((n-1)\)-dimensional Hausdorff measure in \(\mathbb R^n\), so that \({\mathcal H}^{n-1}(A\cap\partial E)\) accounts for the surface tension energy of liquid/air internal interface of the droplet, while \(\sigma:\partial A\to(-1,1)\) is a given function, modeling the relative adhesion coefficient between the liquid droplet and the solid walls of the container. In this article, the authors prove that if \(A\) is a bounded open connected set with boundary of class \(C^{1,1}\), \(\sigma\in\mathrm{Lip}(\partial A)\) with \(-1<\sigma(x)<1\) for every \(x\in\partial A\), and \(g\in\mathrm{Lip}(A)\), then there exist positive constants \(C_{_0}\) and \(m_{_0}\) depending on \(A\), \(\sigma\), and \(g\) such that if \(E_m\) is a minimizer in \((*)\) with \(m\leq m_{_0}\), then there exists \(p_m\in\partial A\) such that \(E_m\subset B_{p_m,C_{_0}m^{1/n}}\) with \(0\leq\sigma_{_0}\leq C_{_0}m^{1/n}\).