Behaviour of doubly connected minimal surfaces at the edges of the support surfaces (Q5953118)

The author investigates the properties of two-dimensional minimal surfaces in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) which are graphs over an annular region \(G\) in the \((x,y)\)-plane and which solve the following boundary problem: The outer boundary is a given fixed Jordan curve \(\Gamma\) which is a generalized graph over the outer boundary of \(G\), i.e. when \(P\) denotes the orthogonal projection onto the \((x y)\)-plane then the fibres of \(P|\Gamma\) are points with finitely many exceptions where they may not be line segments. The inner boundary is free on a support surface \(S,S\) being a vertical cylinder with \(P(S)\) a simple closed polygon in the \((x,y)\)-plane. Moreover, the minimal surface is stationary with respect to this configuration, i.e. it hits \(S\) under a right angle along the free boundary. The existence of such minimal surfaces for given \(\Gamma,S\) was proved in a previous paper of the author. In the present paper the author is mainly concerned with the so called ``edge-creeping phenomenon'', which is the phenomenon that the free trace of the minimal surface on \(S\) may attach to an edge of \(S\) in a full interval. It is e.g. shown that on edges of \(S\) corresponding to intruding vertices of the polygon \(P(S)\) there is no edge-creeping. On the other hand, if \(\Gamma\) decomposes into \(2n\) arcs of monotonicity for the third coordinate \(z\) and if \(P(S)\) has \(2n+\ell\) protruding vertices, then edge-creeping occurs on at least \(\ell\) edges of \(S\). There are a number of further results, also bringing possible symmetries of \(\Gamma\) and \(S\) into the game.