Boundary singularities produced by the motion of soap films

DOI10.1073/PNAS.1406385111MaRDI QIDQ2962229zbMATHOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Raymond E. Goldstein, James P. McTavish, Adriana Pesci, H. K. Moffatt

Publication date 16 February 2017

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1246

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Minimal surfaces and optimization (49Q05) Minimal surfaces in differential geometry, surfaces with prescribed mean curvature (53A10) Applications of differential geometry to physics (53Z05) Thin fluid films (76A20)

Abstract: Recent work has shown that a M"obius strip soap film rendered unstable by deforming its frame changes topology to that of a disk through a 'neck-pinching' boundary singularity. This behavior is unlike that of the catenoid, which transitions to two disks through a bulk singularity. It is not yet understood whether the type of singularity is generally a consequence of the surface topology, nor how this dependence could arise from an equation of motion for the surface. To address these questions we investigate experimentally, computationally, and theoretically the route to singularities of soap films with different topologies, including a family of punctured Klein bottles. We show that the location of singularities (bulk or boundary) may depend on the path of the boundary deformation. In the unstable regime the driving force for soap-film motion is the mean curvature. Thus, the narrowest part of the neck, associated with the shortest nontrivial closed geodesic of the surface, has the highest curvature and is the fastest-moving. Just before onset of the instability there exists on the stable surface a shortest closed geodesic, which is the initial condition for evolution of the neck's geodesics, all of which have the same topological relationship to the frame. We make the plausible conjectures that if the initial geodesic is linked to the boundary then the singularity will occur at the boundary, whereas if the two are unlinked initially then the singularity will occur in the bulk. Numerical study of mean curvature flows and experiments support these conjectures.

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Cites work

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Cited in

(11)

• Soap film catastrophes
• On the homeomorphism problem of trivalent 2-stratifolds with finite homology groups
• The number of simply-connected trivalent 2-dimensional stratifolds
• A Björling representation for Jacobi fields on minimal surfaces and soap film instabilities
• Desingularizing soap-film-like surfaces
• String representation of trivalent 2-stratifolds with trivial fundamental group
• Minimal surface generating flow for space curves of non-vanishing torsion
• Instability of the wet \(X\) soap film
• 2-stratifolds with fundamental group \(\mathbb{Z} \)
• Simulation of a soap film Möbius strip transformation
• Soap-film Möbius strip changes topology with a twist singularity

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