Construction of fillings with prescribed Gaussian image and applications

Abstract

We construct $d$-dimensional polyhedral chains such that the distribution of tangent planes is close to a prescribed measure on the Grassmannian and the chains are either cycles (if the barycenter of the prescribed measure, considered as a measure on $\bigwedge^d \mathbb{R}^n$, is $0$) or their boundary is the boundary of a unit $d$-cube (if the barycenter of the prescribed measure is a simple $d$-vector). Such fillings were first proved to exist by Burago and Ivanov [Geom. funct. anal., 2004]; our work gives an explicit construction, which is also flexible to generalizations. For instance, in the case that the measure on the Grassmannian is supported on the set of positively oriented $d$-planes, we can construct fillings that are Lipschitz multigraphs. We apply this construction to prove the surprising fact that, for anisotropic integrands, polyconvexity is equivalent to quasiconvexity of the associated $Q$-integrands (that is, ellipticity for Lipschitz multigraphs) and to show that strict polyconvexity is necessary for the atomic condition to hold.