Minimal surfaces over stars

A JS surface is a minimal graph over a polygonal domain that becomes infinite in magnitude at the domain boundary. Jenkins and Serrin characterized the existence of these minimal graphs in terms of the signs of the boundary values and the side-lengths of the polygon. For a convex polygon, there can be essentially only one JS surface, but a non-convex domain may admit several distinct JS surfaces.We consider two families of JS surfaces corresponding to different boundary values, namely JS0 and JS1, over domains in the form of regular stars. We give parameterizations for these surfaces as lifts of harmonic maps, and observe that all previously constructed JS surfaces have been of type JS0. We give an example of a JS1 surface that is a new complete embedded minimal surface generalizing Scherk’s doubly periodic surface, and show also that the JS0 surface over a regular convex 2n-gon is the limit of JS1 surfaces over non-convex stars. Finally we consider the construction of other JS surfaces over stars that belong neither to JS0 nor to JS1. © 2007 Published by Elsevier Inc