Associate family

In differential geometry, the associate family (or Bonnet family) of a minimal surface is a one-parameter family of minimal surfaces which share the same Weierstrass data. That is, if the surface has the representation the family is described by where indicates the real part of a complex number. For θ = π/2 the surface is called the conjugate of the θ = 0 surface. The transformation can be viewed as locally rotating the principal curvature directions. The surface normals of a point with a fixed ζ remains unchanged as θ changes; the point itself moves along an ellipse. Some examples of associate surface families are: the catenoid and helicoid family, the Schwarz P, Schwarz D and gyroid family, and the Scherk's first and second surface family. The Enneper surface is conjugate to itself: it is left invariant as θ changes. Conjugate surfaces have the property that any straight line on a surface maps to a planar geodesic on its conjugate surface and vice versa. If a patch of one surface is bounded by a straight line, then the conjugate patch is bounded by a planar symmetry line. This is useful for constructing minimal surfaces by going to the conjugate space: being bound by planes is equivalent to being bound by a polygon. There are counterparts to the associate families of minimal surfaces in higher-dimensional spaces and manifolds.

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On stability of the catenoid under vanishing mean curvature flow on Minkowski space

Joachim Krieger

We establish basic local existence as well as a stability result concerning small perturbations of the Catenoid minimal surface in R-3 under hyperbolic vanishing mean curvature flow. ...

International Press2012

White matter fiber tract segmentation in DT-MRI using geometric flows

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Reto Meuli, Patric Hagmann, Xavier Bresson, Olivier Cuisenaire, Lisa Jonasson

In this paper, we present a 3D geometric flow designed to segment the main core of fiber tracts in diffusion tensor magnetic resonance images. The fundamental assumption of our fiber segmentation technique is that adjacent voxels in a tract have similar pr ...

2005

Triply periodic minimal surface

In differential geometry, a triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) is a minimal surface in R3 that is invariant under a rank-3 lattice of translations. These surfaces have the symmetries of a crystallographic group. Numerous examples are known with cubic, tetragonal, rhombohedral, and orthorhombic symmetries. Monoclinic and triclinic examples are certain to exist, but have proven hard to parametrise. TPMS are of relevance in natural science. TPMS have been observed as biological membranes, as block copolymers, equipotential surfaces in crystals etc.

Minimal surface

In mathematics, a minimal surface is a surface that locally minimizes its area. This is equivalent to having zero mean curvature (see definitions below). The term "minimal surface" is used because these surfaces originally arose as surfaces that minimized total surface area subject to some constraint. Physical models of area-minimizing minimal surfaces can be made by dipping a wire frame into a soap solution, forming a soap film, which is a minimal surface whose boundary is the wire frame.