Stable and unstable helices: soap films in cylindrical tubes

Abstract

Cox and Jones recently devised and studied an interesting variant of the classical Plateau problem, a variant in which a helical soap film is confined to a cylindrical tube with circular cross-section. Through experiments, numerics, and some analysis, they found that the length and (inner) radius of the tube strongly influence the equilibrium shape of the confined soap film. In this paper, an area minimization problem associated with determining the shape of the film is formulated and analyzed to determine which surfaces are local minima. The connection between a functional inequality and the associated eigenvalue problem plays an important role in the analysis. For helical films, a more detailed analysis is carried out and stability conditions consistent with the experimental and numerical results of Cox and Jones are obtained.