The Euler-Helfrich Functional

Abstract

We investigate equilibrium configurations for surface energies which contain the squared $L^2$ norm of the difference of the mean curvature H and the spontaneous curvature $c_o$ coupled with the elastic energy of the boundary curve, which we studied previously in [23]. It is shown that if a critical surface for this type of functional is axially symmetric, then it satisfies a simpler second order variational problem. Many examples of solutions of this are given.