Integral Menger curvature for surfaces (Q624322)

The authors develop the concept of integral Menger curvature for a large class of non-smooth surfaces. They prove uniform Ahlfors regularity and a \(C^{1,\lambda}\) a priori bound for surfaces for which this functional is finite. As two variational applications of their results, they prove the existence of surfaces in given isotopy classes minimizing integral Menger curvature with a uniform bound on area, and of area minimizing surfaces subject to a uniform bound on integral Menger curvature.