From rubber bands to rational maps: A research report

This research report outlines work, partially joint with Jeremy Kahn and Kevin Pilgrim, which gives parallel theories of elastic graphs and conformal surfaces with boundary. One one hand, this lets us tell when one rubber band network is looser than another, and on the other hand tell when one conformal surface embeds in another. We apply this to give a new characterization of hyperbolic critically finite rational maps among branched self-coverings of the sphere, by a positive criterion: a branched covering is equivalent to a hyperbolic rational map if and only if there is an elastic graph with a particular "self-embedding" property. This complements the earlier negative criterion of W. Thurston.Comment: 52 pages, numerous figures. v2: New example

Minimal surfaces in the Heisenberg group

We investigate the minimal surface problem in the three dimensional Heisenberg group, H, equipped with its standard Carnot-Caratheodory metric. Using a particular surface measure, we characterize minimal surfaces in terms of a sub-elliptic partial differential equation and prove an existence result for the Plateau problem in this setting. Further, we provide a link between our minimal surfaces and Riemannian constant mean curvature surfaces in H equipped with different Riemannian metrics approximating the Carnot-Caratheodory metric. We generate a large library of examples of minimal surfaces and use these to show that the solution to the Dirichlet problem need not be unique. Moreover, we show that the minimal surfaces we construct are in fact X-minimal surfaces in the sense of Garofalo and Nhieu.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figure

Tropical secant graphs of monomial curves

The first secant variety of a projective monomial curve is a threefold with an action by a one-dimensional torus. Its tropicalization is a three-dimensional fan with a one-dimensional lineality space, so the tropical threefold is represented by a balanced graph. Our main result is an explicit construction of that graph. As a consequence, we obtain algorithms to effectively compute the multidegree and Chow polytope of an arbitrary projective monomial curve. This generalizes an earlier degree formula due to Ranestad. The combinatorics underlying our construction is rather delicate, and it is based on a refinement of the theory of geometric tropicalization due to Hacking, Keel and Tevelev.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures. Major revision of the exposition. In particular, old Sections 4 and 5 are merged into a single section. Also, added Figure 3 and discussed Chow polytopes of rational normal curves in Section