Stable capillary hypersurfaces and the partitioning problem in balls with radial weights (Q6107066)

Given a ball \(B\), the relative isoperimetric problem amounts to finding subsets of \(B\) enclosing a given volume and minimizing the relative (to \(B\)) perimeter. A capillary surface in \(B\) instead is a hyper-surface with mean curvature making a constant angle \(\theta\) with \(\partial B\) (relative isoperimetric regions are capillary surfaces with \(\theta = \pi/2\)). It is well-known that all and only relative isoperimetric regions have as boundary inside \(B\) spherical caps meeting \(\partial B\) orthogonally or equatorial disks. In this paper, the author studies relative isoperimetric regions and stable capillary surfaces in balls endowed with a radial weight, that is, both the Euclidean volume and the relative perimeter are weighted by a smooth, positive density depending only on the distance from the center of the ball. The same methods yielding existence in the standard Euclidean case still apply, but notably spherical caps meeting \(\partial B\) orthogonally do not necessarily bound weighted relative isoperimetric regions. The author proves some geometric and topological properties of any weighted minimizer \(E\), showing that if the interior boundary \(\overline{\partial E \cap B}\) is connected, then this is a smooth hyper-surface, symmetric about a line through the center of the ball, and homeomorphic to either a closed \(N\)-dimensional disk or to an \(N\)-dimensional sphere (ref.\ Theorem 4.2). The proof of this result employs a stability result for weighted stable capillary surfaces (ref.\ Theorems 3.6 and 3.8).