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Soap bubbles and minimal surfaces

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Created on April 4, 2024

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Transcript

Soap bubbles and minimal surfaces

Virginia Aguilera Gómez

INDEX

  1. What is it?
  2. How does it work?
  3. Joseph Plateau
  4. Where is it on Matemápolis?
  5. Experiment
  6. Bibliography

What is it?

A bubble has the smallest surface possible. That’s why they recieved the name of minimal surfaces. They are called that way because they minimalize the surface for a determined volume. A bubble has the capacity to form a thin layer catching the air. That’s why they use the tension can influence a lot. Minimal surfaces are a two-dimensional element that locally minimizes its area. This is equivalent to having zero mean curvature. Physical models of surfaces that minimize an area can be visualized by introducing a wire frame into a soap solution, then forming a soap film, forming a minimal surface whose boundary is the wire frame.

How does it work?

A thin film of soap is formed by a thin layer of water trapped between two layers of surfactant molecules, in this case soap. The shape is determined by surface tension, a property that liquids have, which is like an energy necessary for cohesion between molecules. The mean curvature is a measure of how much the normal vector to the surface changes when we move slightly along the surface, that is, how curved the surface is in a point.

Joseph Plateau

Joseph-Antoine Ferdinand Plateau was a Belgian physicist who defined the principle of the persistence of vision in 1829. He's know becayse he created the Plateau's Problem, which tried to show the existence of a minimal surface with a given boundary. The question is: Which is the surface of rotation that has the smallest possible area?

Where is it?

Bibliography

  • https://www.ucm.es/data/cont/docs/76-2013-06-11-02_Surface_tension_and_soap_films.pdf
  • https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problema_de_Plateau
  • https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph-Antoine_Ferdinand_Plateau

Thank you