Existence and soap film regularity of solutions to Plateau's problem

Abstract: Plateau's soap film problem is to find a surface of least area spanning a given boundary. We begin with a compact orientable

(n - 2)

-dimensional submanifold

M

of

R^{n}

. If

M

is connected, we say a compact set

X

"spans"

M

if

X

intersects every Jordan curve whose linking number with

M

is 1. Picture a soap film that spans a loop of wire. Using

(n - 1)

-dimensional Hausdorff spherical measure as the measure of the size of a compact set

X

in

R^{n}

, we prove there exists a smallest compact set

X_{0}

that spans

M

. We also show that

X_{0}

is almost everywhere a real analytic

(n - 1)

-dimensional minimal submanifold and if

n = 3

, then

X_{0}

has the structure of a soap film as predicted by Plateau. We provide more details about the minimizer

X_{0}

. Primarily,

X_{0}

is the support of a current

S_{0}

and

M

is the support of the algebraic boundary of

S_{0}

. We also discuss the more general case where

M

has codimension

> 2

.

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