Global minimizers for the doubly-constrained Helfrich energy: the axisymmetric case (Q376611)

From authors' abstract: ``Since the pioneering work of Canham and Helfrich, variational formulations involving curvature-dependent functionals, like the classical Willmore functional, have proven useful for shape analysis of biomembranes.'' From the authors' introduction: ``For compact surfaces \(\Sigma\) embedded in \(\mathbb R^3\), the Canham-Helfrich functional is defined by \[ {\mathcal H}(\Sigma)=\int_\Sigma\left\{0.5\,{\kappa_{_H}}\left(H-H_0\right)+\kappa_{_G}K\right\}d A \] where the integration is with respect to the ordinary \(2\)-dimensional area measure, \(H\) is the sum of the principal curvatures of \(\Sigma\), \(K\) is the Gaussian curvature, \(\kappa_{_H}, \kappa_{_G}\in\mathbb R\) are constant bending rigidities, and \(H_0\in\mathbb R\) is a given spontaneous curvature.'' ``Biological membranes and their shapes have attracted attention from researchers across many areas of mathematics. For example, membranes connect classical problems of differential geometry involving Willmore's functional to studies of shape configurations of biological cells in physics and biology.'' In this paper, the authors ``prove the existence of a global minimizer for \({\mathcal H}\) in the class of finite systems of axisymmetric surfaces, under the constraints that the total area and the total enclosed volume of the surfaces are fixed.''