A biharmonic analogue of the Alt–Caffarelli problem

Abstract

We study a natural biharmonic analogue of the classical Alt–Caffarelli problem, both under Dirichlet and under Navier boundary conditions. We show existence, basic properties and \(C^{1,\alpha }\)-regularity of minimisers. For the Navier problem we also obtain a symmetry result in case that the boundary data are radial. We find this remarkable because the problem under investigation is of higher order. Computing radial minimisers explicitly we find that the obtained regularity is optimal.