Paper detail

Rotating Drops with Helicoidal Symmetry

See http://youtu.be/Mf4IE8gWcJs for a YouTube video showing part of the results in this paper. We consider helicoidal immersions in the Euclidean space whose axis of symmetry is the z-axis that are solutions of the equation 2 H=Λ_0-a 1/2 R^2 where H is the mean curvature of the surface, R is the distance form the point in the surface to the z-axis and a is a real number. We refer to these surfaces as helicoidal rotating drops. We prove the existence of properly immersed solutions that contain the z-axis. We also show the existence of several families of embedded examples. We describe the set of possible solutions and we show that most of these solutions are not properly immerse and are dense in the region bounded by two concentric cylinders. We show that all properly immersed solutions, besides being invariant under a one parameter helicoidal group, they are invariant under a cyclic group of rotations of the variables x and y. The second variation of energy for the volume constrained problem with Dirichlet boundary conditions is also studied.