On the geometry of the rotating liquid drop

Abstract

Here we consider the problem of a fluid body rotating with a constant angular velocity and subjected to surface tension. Determining the equilibrium configuration of this system turns out to be equivalent to the geometrical problem of determining the surface of revolution with a prescribed mean curvature. In the simply connected case, the equilibrium surface can be parameterized explicitly via elliptic integrals of the first and second kind. Here, we present two such parameterizations of the drops and we use the second of them to study finer details of the drop surfaces such as the existence of closed geodesics.