The $n$-dimensional analogue of the catenary: existence and nonexistence

We study "heavy" A?-dimensional surfaces suspended from some prescribed (n — 1) -dimensional boundary data. This leads to a mean curvature type equation with a non-monotone right hand side. We show that the equation has no solution if the boundary data are too small, and, using a fixed point argument, that the problem always has a smooth solution for sufficiently large boundary data.