Uniform ball property and existence of optimal shapes for a wide class of geometric functionals

Abstract

In this article, we study shape optimization problems involving the geometry of surfaces (normal vector, principal curvatures). Given $\epsilon >0$ and a fixed non-empty large bounded open hold-all $B\subset {\mathbb{R}}^n$, $n⩾2$, we consider a specific class ${\mathcal{O}}_{\epsilon }(B)$ of open sets $\Omega \subset B$ satisfying a uniform $\epsilon$-ball condition. First, we recall that this geometrical property $\Omega \in {\mathcal{O}}_{\epsilon }(B)$ can be equivalently characterized in terms of $C^{1,1}$-regularity of the boundary $\partial \Omega \ne \varnothing$, and thus also in terms of positive reach and oriented distance function. Then, the main contribution of this paper is to prove the existence of a $C^{1,1}$-regular minimizer among $\Omega \in {\mathcal{O}}_{\epsilon }(B)$ for a general range of geometric functionals and constraints defined on the boundary $\partial \Omega$, involving the first- and second-order properties of surfaces, such as problems of the form:

where $\mathbf{n}$, $H$, $K$ respectively denote the unit outward normal vector, the scalar mean curvature and the Gaussian curvature. We only assume continuity of $j_0,j_1,j_2$ with respect to the set of variables and convexity of $j_1,j_2$ with respect to the last variable, but no growth condition on $j_1,j_2$ are imposed here regarding the last variable. Finally, we give various applications in the modelling of red blood cells such as the Canham–Helfrich energy and the Willmore functional.