Vanishing geodesic distance on spaces of submanifolds and diffeomorphisms.
Variational characterization of equations of motion in bundles of embeddings.
In this paper we study variational principles for a general situation which includes free boundary problems with surface tension. Following [2], our main result concerns a variational principle in a infinite dimensional principal bundle of embeddings of a compact region D in a manifold M having the same dimension as D. By considering arbitrary variations, free boundary problems are included, while variations parallel to the boundary permit to consider fluid motion or flow of Hamiltonian vector fields...