Partial Plateau's Problem with H-mass

Abstract: Classically, Plateau's problem asks to find a surface of the least area with a given boundary

B

. In this article, we investigate a version of Plateau's problem, where the boundary of an admissible surface is only required to partially span

B

. Our boundary data is given by a flat

(m - 1)

-chain

B

and a smooth compactly supported differential

(m - 1)

-form

P h i

. We are interested in minimizing

m a t h b f M (T) - i n t_{p a r t i a l T} P h i

over all

m

-dimensional rectifiable currents

T

in

m a t h b b R^{n}

such that

p a r t i a l T

is a subcurrent of the given boundary

B

. The existence of a rectifiable minimizer is proven with Federer and Fleming's compactness theorem. We generalize this problem by replacing the mass

m a t h b f M

with the

H

-mass of rectifiable currents. By minimizing over a larger class of objects, called scans with boundary, and by defining their

H

-mass as a type of lower-semicontinuous envelope over the

H

-mass of rectifiable currents, we prove an existence result for this problem by using Hardt and De Pauw's BV compactness theorem.

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