A Barrier Principle for Surfaces with Prescribed Mean Curvature and Arbitrary Codimension

Abstract

We consider two dimensional surfaces ${X : \Omega\to\mathbb R^{n+2}, \Omega\subset \mathbb C, w=u+iv\mapsto X(w)}$ with arbitrary codimension n and prove a barrier principle for strong (possibly branched) subsolutions ${X\in C^1(\Omega, \mathbb {R}^{n+2})\cap H_{2,{\rm loc}}^2(\Omega,\mathbb R^{n+2})}$ of the integral inequality

$$\int_{\Omega} \Big\lbrace \langle \nabla X, \nabla \varphi\rangle +2W \sum_{k=1}^n H_k \langle N_k,\varphi \rangle \Big\rbrace \; dudv\ge 0$$

with mean curvature functions (H _k ) _k=1,...,n which lie locally on one side of a supporting hypersurface S. We show under suitable assumption on the 2-mean curvature of the supporting surface S that X is locally contained in S. This generalizes a corresponding result for surfaces in ${\mathbb R^3}$ , cf. (Dierkes et al., Regularity of Minimal Surfaces, §4.4, 2010).