An Improved Nonexistence Bound for the Liquid Drop Model

Abstract

For Gamow's liquid drop model, we improve the nonexistence bound of Frank-Killip-Nam from 8 to 7.5. The key additional input is a geometric perimeter inequality arising from the capillarity problem. This yields a quantitative gain in the averaged slicing argument and shows that the variational problem admits no minimizer for $A\ge 7.5$.

16 pages