A characterization of constant $p$-mean curvature surfaces in the Heisenberg group $H_1$

Abstract

In Euclidean $3$-space, it is well known that the Sine-Gordon equation was considered in the nineteenth century in the course of investigations of surfaces of constant Gaussian curvature $K=-1$. Such a surface can be constructed from a solution to the Sine-Gordon equation, and vice versa. With this as motivation, employing the fundamental theorem of surfaces in the Heisenberg group $H_{1}$, we show in this paper that the existence of a constant $p$-mean curvature surface (without singular points) is equivalent to the existence of a solution to a nonlinear second-order ODE (1.2), which is a kind of {\bf Li\'{e}nard equations}. Therefore, we turn to investigate this equation. It is a surprise that we give a complete set of solutions to (1.2) (or (1.5)), and hence use the types of the solution to divide constant $p$-mean curvature surfaces into several classes. As a result, after a kind of normalization, we obtain a representation of constant $p$-mean curvature surfaces and classify further all constant $p$-mean curvature surfaces. In Section 9, we provide an approach to construct $p$-minimal surfaces. It turns out that, in some sense, generic $p$-minimal surfaces can be constructed via this approach. Finally, as a derivation, we recover the Bernstein-type theorem which was first shown in [3] (or see [7,8]).