On the regularity of timelike extremal surfaces

Abstract

We study a class of timelike weakly extremal surfaces in flat Minkowski space $\mathbb R^{1+n}$, characterized by the fact that they admit a $C^1$ parametrization (in general not an immersion) of a specific form. We prove that if the distinguished parametrization is of class $C^k$, then the surface is regularly immersed away from a closed singular set of euclidean Hausdorff dimension at most $1+1/k$, and that this bound is sharp. We also show that, generically with respect to a natural topology, the singular set of a timelike weakly extremal cylinder in $\mathbb R^{1+n}$ is 1-dimensional if $n=2$, and it is empty if $n \ge 4$. For $n=3$, timelike weakly extremal surfaces exhibit an intermediate behavior.