m at h . D G ] 1 A ug 2 00 6 EXISTENCE AND UNIQUENESS FOR P - AREA MINIMIZERS IN THE HEISENBERG GROUP

In [3], we studied p-mean curvature and the associated p-minimal surfaces in the Heisenberg group from the viewpoint of PDE and differential geometry. In this paper, we look into the problem through the variational formulation. We study a generalized p-area and associated (p-) minimizers in general dimensions. We prove the existence and investigate the uniqueness of minimizers. Since this is reduced to solving a degenerate elliptic equation, we need to consider the effect of the singular set and this requires a careful study. We define the notion of weak solution and prove that in a certain Sobolev space, a weak solution is a minimizer and vice versa. We also give many interesting examples in dimension 2. An intriguing point is that, in dimension 2, a C-smooth solution from the PDE viewpoint may not be a minimizer. However, this statement is true for higher dimensions due to the relative smallness of the size of the singular set.