The angle criterion.
We study the shape of stationary surfaces with prescribed mean curvature in the Euclidean 3-space near boundary points where Plateau boundaries meet free boundaries. In deriving asymptotic expansions at such points, we generalize known results about minimal surfaces due to G. Dziuk. The main difficulties arise from the fact that, contrary to minimal surfaces, surfaces with prescribed mean curvature do not meet the support manifold perpendicularly along their free boundary, in general.
For a given domain , we consider the variational problem of minimizing the -norm of the gradient on of a function with prescribed continuous boundary values and satisfying a continuous lower obstacle condition inside . Under the assumption of strictly positive mean curvature of the boundary , we show existence of a continuous solution, with Holder exponent half of that of data and obstacle. This generalizes previous results obtained for the unconstrained and double-obstacle problems. The...