Stationary polyhedral varifolds minimize area

Abstract

We prove that every stationary polyhedral varifold minimizes area in the following senses: (1) its area cannot be decreased by a one-to-one Lipschitz ambient deformation that coincides with the identity outside of a compact set, and (2) it is the varifold associated to a mass-minimizing flat chain with coefficients in a certain metric abelian group. NOTE: After this paper was posted, I learned that (1) and (2) were already proved by Choe and Morgan, respectively. Thus this paper is an exposition of their results.