Domains in Metric Measure Spaces with Boundary of Positive Mean Curvature, and the Dirichlet Problem for Functions of Least Gradient

Journal article, 2018

We study the geometry of domains in complete metric measure spaces equipped with a doubling measure supporting a 1-Poincaré inequality. We propose a notion of domain with boundary of positive mean curvature and prove that, for such domains, there is always a solution to the Dirichlet problem for least gradients with continuous boundary data. Here least gradient is defined as minimizing total variation (in the sense of BV functions), and boundary conditions are satisfied in the sense that the boundary trace of the solution exists and agrees with the given boundary data. This extends the result of Sternberg et al. (J Reine Angew Math 430:35–60, 1992) to the non-smooth setting. Via counterexamples, we also show that uniqueness of solutions and existence of continuous solutions can fail, even in the weighted Euclidean setting with Lipschitz weights.