Proving area minimization by directed slicing (Q4254048)

In this paper, the author establishes the foundations of a general method for applying slicing techniques to show that certain surfaces are area minimizing. This work generalizes and puts into a uniform context various results and examples of the author and others (as described in the second section of the paper). Given a surface that one wishes to prove is area minimizing, the general idea is to slice up space in such a way that each slice of the surface solves a related minimization problem within its own slice of space. If all goes well, this can be done in such a way that the question of minimization can be made sufficiently local that the proof of minimization is easier and more intuitive, while still being sufficiently global that the original surface can be seen to be area minimizing. A nice selection of simple illustrative examples is provided in the third section of the paper. These examples should be extremely helpful to the reader. The crucial definitions and theorems for the method of directed slicing are to be found in sections four, six, and seven of the paper. These consist of results on the theory of slicing (section four), existence results for minimizers in the slices (section six), and results on properties of 1-dimensional minimizers (section seven). As an application of the method, new minimization results concerning pairs of planes are given in section five.