Variational Worn Stones

Abstract

We introduce an evolution model à la Firey for a convex stone which tumbles on a beach and undertakes an erosion process depending on some variational energy, such as torsional rigidity, a principal Dirichlet Laplacian eigenvalue, or Newtonian capacity. Relying on the assumption of the existence of a solution to the corresponding parabolic flow, we prove that the stone tends to become asymptotically spherical. Indeed, we identify an ultimate shape of these flows with a smooth convex body whose ground state satisfies an additional boundary condition, and we prove symmetry results for the corresponding overdetermined elliptic problems. Moreover, we extend the analysis to arbitrary convex bodies: we introduce new notions of cone variational measures and we prove that, if such a measure is absolutely continuous with constant density, the underlying body is a ball.