Alexander West
My name is Alexander West. In May 2024, I started my PhD-studies under the supervision of Dr. Christian Scharrer and Prof. Dr. Stefan Müller. I am interested in the study of the Willmore functional, which assigns to a surface the integral over the mean curvature squared. This is a natural, scaling-invariant choice to describe the total bending of a surface. Closely related is the Helfrich functional, which differs from the Willmore energy by a linear combination of the total mean curvature and the area and finds applications in the study of shapes of lipid bilayer cell membranes. Surfaces with bounded Willmore energy may degenerate in a specific way by developing bubbles. Here, a bubble can be thought of as a region which pinches off from the remaining surface. I study these bubbling phenomena, with a focus on the biological context. |
Institute for Applied Mathematics |
