Kirchhoff elastic rods in three-dimensional space forms

Abstract

The Kirchhoff elastic rod is one of the mathematical models of thin elastic rods, and is characterized as a critical point of the energy functional obtained by adding the effect of twisting to the bending energy. In this paper, we investigate Kirchhoff elastic rods in three-dimensional space forms. In particular, we give explicit formulas of Kirchhoff elastic rods in the three-sphere and in the three-dimensional hyperbolic space in terms of Jacobi sn function and the elliptic integrals.