Boundary singularities produced by the motion of soap films

DOI10.1073/PNAS.1406385111zbMATH Open1355.53009arXiv1407.1246OpenAlexW2053710594WikidataQ33767722 ScholiaQ33767722MaRDI QIDQ2962229FDOQ2962229

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)

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.

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

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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)

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Cited In (11)

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

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