Tautness and Lie Sphere Geometry.
We consider the level set formulation of the inverse mean curvature flow. We establish a connection to the problem of -harmonic functions and give a new proof for the existence of weak solutions.
For two-dimensional, immersed closed surfaces , we study the curvature functionals and with integrands and , respectively. Here is the second fundamental form, is the mean curvature and we assume . Our main result asserts that critical points are smooth in both cases. We also prove a compactness theorem for -bounded sequences. In the case of this is just Langer’s theorem [16], while for we have to impose a bound for the Willmore energy strictly below as an additional condition....