Let $(M^{n+1},g,e^{-f}dμ)$ be a complete smooth metric measure space with $2\leq n\leq 6$ and Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature bounded below by a positive constant. We prove a smooth compactness theorem for the space of complete embedded $f$-minimal hypersurfaces in $M$ with uniform upper bounds on $f$-index and weighted volume. As a corollary, we obtain a smooth compactness theorem for the space of embedded self-shrinkers in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ with $2\leq n\leq 6$. We also prove some estimates on the $f$-index of $f$-minimal hypersurfaces, and give a conformal structure of $f$-minimal surface with finite $f$-index in three-dimensional smooth metric measure space.
We prove a compactness result for minimal hypersurfaces with bounded index and volume, which can be thought of as an extension of the compactness theorem of Choi-Schoen (Invent. Math. 1985) to higher dimensions.
We make rigorous an old idea of using mean curvature flow to prove a theorem of Richard Hamilton on the compactness of proper hypersurfaces with pinched, bounded curvature.
Given a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary, we prove that the limit of a sequence of embedded, almost properly embedded free boundary minimal hypersurfaces, with uniform area and Morse index upper bound, always inherits a non-trivial Jacobi field. To approach this, we prove a one-sided Harnack inequality for minimal graphs on balls with many holes.
We prove that a stable minimal hypersurface of an open ball having a singular set of locally finite codimension 2 Hausdorff measure which is weakly close to a multiplicity 2 hyperplane is a 2-valued C^{1, alpha} graph in the interior. Applications including a compactness theorem for a class of immersed stable minimal hypersurfaces and a pointwise curvature estimate for the hypersurfaces in this class in low dimensions are also discussed.
We investigate compactness phenomena involving free boundary minimal hypersurfaces in Riemannian manifolds of dimension less than eight. We provide natural geometric conditions that ensure strong one-sheeted graphical subsequential convergence, discuss the limit behaviour when multi-sheeted convergence happens and derive various consequences in terms of finiteness and topological control.
We show that the space of min-max minimal hypersurfaces is non-compact when the manifold has an analytic metric of positive Ricci curvature and dimension $3\leq n+1\leq 7$. Furthermore, we show that bumpy metrics with positive Ricci curvature admit minimal hypersurfaces with unbounded index+area. When combined with the recent work fo F.C. Marques and A. Neves, we then deduce some new properties regarding the infinitely many minimal hypersurfaces they found.
Given a closed Riemannian manifold of dimenion less than eight, we prove a compactness result for the space of closed, embedded minimal hypersurfaces satisfying a volume bound and a uniform lower bound on the first eigenvalue of the stability operator. When the latter assumption is replaced by a uniform lower bound on the p-th Jacobi eigenvalue for p greater or equal than 2 one gains strong convergence to a smooth limit submanifold away from at most p-1 points.
We consider the continuous $W^{2,d}$ immersions of $d$-dimensional hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{R}^{d+1}$ with second fundamental forms uniformly bounded in $L^d$. Two results are obtained: first, a family of such immersions is constructed, whose limit fails to be an immersion of a manifold. This addresses the endpoint cases in J. Langer and P. Breuning. Second, under the additional assumption that the Gauss map is slowly oscillating, we prove that any family of such immersions subsequentially converges to a set locally parametrised by Hölder functions.
Given a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary, we prove that the space of embedded, which may be improper, free boundary minimal hypersurfaces with uniform area and Morse index upper bound is compact in the sense of smoothly graphical convergence away from finitely many points. We show that the limit of a sequence of such hypersurfaces always inherits a non-trivial Jacobi field when it has multiplicity one. In a forthcoming paper, we will construct Jacobi fields when the convergence has higher multiplicity.
We prove the two theorems of the title, settling two long standing questions in the local theory of singular minimal hypersurfaces. The sharpness of either result is with respect to its hypothesis on the size of the allowable singular sets. The proofs of both theorems rely heavily on the author's recent regularity and compactness theory for stable minimal hypersurfaces, and on earlier work of Ilmanen, Simon and Solomon--White.
The Min-max Theory for the area functional, started by Almgren in the early 1960s and greatly improved by Pitts in 1981, was left incomplete because it gave no Morse index estimate for the min-max minimal hypersurface. We advance the theory further and prove the first general Morse index bounds for minimal hypersurfaces produced by it. We also settle the multiplicity problem for the classical case of one-parameter sweepouts.
We consider, in a first instance, the class of boundaries of sets with locally finite perimeter whose (weakly defined) mean curvature is $g ν$, for a given continuous positive ambient function $g$, and where $ν$ denotes the inner normal. It is well-known that taking limits in the sense of varifolds within this class is not possible in general, due to the appearence of "hidden boundaries", that is, portions (of positive measure with even multiplicity) on which the (weakly defined) mean curvature vanishes, so that $g$ does not prescribe the mean curvature in the limit. As a special instance of a…
Let (M,g) be a compact Riemannian three-dimensional manifold with boundary. We prove the compactness of the set of scalar-flat metrics which are in the conformal class of g and have the boundary as a constant mean curvature hypersurface. This involves a blow-up analysis of a Yamabe-type equation with critical Sobolev exponent on the boundary.
With a view to constructing a Morse/Floer homology theory for CMC hypersurfaces, we prove a compactness result modulo broken trajectories for eternal mean curvature flows with forcing term in compact, hyperbolic manifolds.
A 7-dimensional area-minimizing embedded hypersurface $M$ will in general have a discrete singular set. The same is true if $M$ is stable, or has bounded index, provided $H^6(sing M) = 0$. We show that if $M_i$ are a sequence of such minimal hypersurfaces which are minimizing, stable, or have bounded index, then $M_i$ can limit to a singular $M$ with only very controlled geometry, topology, and singular set. We show one can always "parameterize" a subsequence $i'$ with controlled bi-Lipschitz maps $ϕ_{i'}$ taking $ϕ_{i'}(M_{1'}) = M_{i'}$. As a consequence, we prove the space of smooth, closed…
In this paper, we give an improved Morse index bound of minimal hypersurfaces from Almgren-Pitts min-max construction in any closed Riemannian manifold $M^{n+1}$ $(n+1 \geq 3$), which generalizes a result by X. Zhou \cite{zhou_multiplicity_2019} for $3 \leq n+1 \leq 7$. The novel techniques are the construction of hierarchical deformations and the restrictive min-max theory. These techniques do not rely on bumpy metrics, and thus could be adapted to many other min-max settings.
The combined work of Guaraco, Hutchinson, Tonegawa and Wickramasekera has recently produced a new proof of the classical theorem that any closed Riemannian manifold of dimension $n + 1 \geq 3$ contains a minimal hypersurface with a singular set of Hausdorff dimension at most $n-7$. This proof avoids the Almgren--Pitts geometric min-max procedure for the area functional that was instrumental in the original proof, and is instead based on a considerably simpler PDE min-max construction of critical points of the Allen--Cahn functional. Here we prove a spectral lower bound for the hypersurfaces ar…
Let (M,g) a compact Riemannian n-dimensional manifold with umbilic boundary. It is well know that, under certain hypothesis, in the conformal class of g there are scalar-flat metrics that have the boundary of M as a constant mean curvature hypersurface. In this paper we prove that these metrics are a compact set, provided n=8 and the Weyl tensor of the boundary is always different from zero, or if n>8 and the Weyl tensor of M is always different from zero on the boundary.
Let (M,g) be a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary. This paper is concerned with the set of scalar-flat metrics which are in the conformal class of g and have the boundary as a constant mean curvature hypersurface. We prove that this set is compact for dimensions greater than or equal to 7 under the generic condition that the trace-free 2nd fundamental form of the boundary is nonzero everywhere.
We give a partial local description of minimal hypersurfaces $M^3$ with identically zero Gauß-Kronecker curvature function in the unit 4-sphere $\Bbb{S}^4(1)$, without assumption on the compactness of $M^3$.
Let (M,g) a compact Riemannian $n$-dimensional manifold with umbilic boundary. It is well know that, under certain hypothesis, in the conformal class of g there are scalar-flat metrics that have the boundary of M as a constant mean curvature hypersurface. In this paper we prove that these metrics are a compact set in the case of low dimensional manifolds, that is n=6,7,8, provided that the Weyl tensor is always not vanishing on the boundary.
In contrast with the 3-dimensional case (cf. \cite{RaMo}), where rotationally symmetric totally geodesic free boundary minimal surfaces have Morse index one; we prove in this work that the Morse index of a free boundary rotationally symmetric totally geodesic hypersurface of the $n$-dimensional Riemannnian Schwarzschild space with respect to variations that are tangential along the horizon is zero, for $n\geq4$. Moreover, we show that there exist non-compact free boundary minimal hypersurfaces which are not totally geodesic, $n\geq 8$, with Morse index equal to $0$. Also, it is shown that, for…
In this paper, we prove that the Morse index of a multiplicity one, smooth, min-max minimal hypersurface is generically equal to the dimension of the homology class detected by the families used in the construction. This confirms part of the program (\cite{marques-icm}, \cite{marques-neves-cycles}, \cite{marques-neves-index}, \cite{neves-icm}) proposed by the authors with the goal of developing a Morse theory for the area functional.
We prove qualitative estimates on the total curvature of closed minimal hypersurfaces in closed Riemannian manifolds in terms of their index and area, restricting to the case where the hypersurface has dimension less than seven. In particular, we prove that if we are given a sequence of closed minimal hypersurfaces of bounded area and index, the total curvature along the sequence is quantised in terms of the total curvature of some limit surface, plus a sum of total curvatures of complete properly embedded minimal hypersurfaces in Euclidean space - all of which are finite. Thus, we obtain qual…
In 1968, Simons introduced the concept of index for hypersurfaces immersed into the Euclidean sphere S^{n+1}. Intuitively, the index measures the number of independent directions in which a given hypersurface fails to minimize area. The earliest results regarding the index focused on the case of minimal hypersurfaces. Many such results established lower bounds for the index. More recently, however, mathematicians have generalized these results to hypersurfaces with constant mean curvature. In this paper, we consider hypersurfaces of constant mean curvature immersed into the sphere and give low…
Let M,g a compact Riemannian n-dimensional manifold. It is well know that, under certain hypothesis, in the conformal class of g there are scalar-flat metrics that have the boundary of M as a constant mean curvature hypersurface. Also, under certain hypothesis, it is known that these metrics are a compact set. In this paper we prove that, both in the case of umbilic and non-umbilic boundary, if we linearly perturb the mean curvature term with a negative smooth function, the set of solutions of Yamabe problem is still a compact set.
We give two structural conditions on a codimension $1$ integral $n$-varifold with first variation locally summable to an exponent $p>n$ that imply the following: whenever each orientable portion of the $C^{1}$-embedded part of the varifold (which is non-empty by the Allard regularity theory) is stationarity and the $C^{2}$-immersed part of it is stable with respect to the area functional for volume preserving deformations, its support, except possibly on a closed set of codimension $7$, is an immersed constant-mean-curvature (cmc) hypersurface of class $C^{2}$ that can fail to be embedded only…
It is known that the totally umbilical hypersurfaces in the (n+1)-dimensional spheres are characterized as the only hypersurfaces with weak stability index 0. That is, a compact hypersurface with constant mean curvature, cmc, in S^{n+1}, different from an Euclidean sphere, must have stability index greater than or equal to 1. In this paper we prove that the weak stability index of any non-totally umbilical compact hypersurface M\subset S^{n+1} with cmc cannot take the values 1,2,3... n.
We prove that the index is bounded from below by a linear function of its first Betti number for any compact free boundary $f$-minimal hypersurface in certain positively curved weighted manifolds.
In this paper, we give an explicit second variation formula for a biharmonic hypersurface in a Riamannian manifold similar to that of a minimal hypersurface. We then use the second variation formula to compute the stability index of the known biharmonic hypersurfaces in a Euclidean sphere, and to prove the non-existence of unstable proper biharmonic hypersurface in a Euclidean space or a hyperbolic space, which adds another special case to support Chen's conjecture on biharmonic submanifolds.
Generalizing earlier work by Ros in ambient dimension three, we prove an affine lower bound for the Morse index of closed minimal hypersurfaces inside a flat torus in terms of their first Betti number (with purely dimensional coefficients).
For any smooth Riemannian metric on an $(n+1)$-dimensional compact manifold with boundary $(M,\partial M)$ where $3\leq (n+1)\leq 7$, we establish general upper bounds for the Morse index of free boundary minimal hypersurfaces produced by min-max theory in the Almgren-Pitts setting. We apply our Morse index estimates to prove that for almost every (in the $C^\infty$ Baire sense) Riemannan metric, the union of all compact, properly embedded free boundary minimal hypersurfaces is dense in $M$. If $\partial M$ is further assumed to have a strictly mean convex point, we show the existence of infin…
In this paper, we consider minimal hypersurfaces in the product space $\mathbb{H}^n \times \mathbb{R}$. We begin by studying examples of rotation hypersurfaces and hypersurfaces invariant under hyperbolic translations. We then consider minimal hypersurfaces with finite total curvature. This assumption implies that the corresponding curvature goes to zero uniformly at infinity. We show that surfaces with finite total intrinsic curvature have finite index. The converse statement is not true as shown by our examples which also serve as useful barriers.
We develop a bubble-compactness theory for embedded CMC hypersurfaces with bounded index and area inside closed Riemannian manifolds in low dimensions. In particular we show that convergence always occurs with multiplicity one, which implies that the minimal blow-ups (bubbles) are all catenoids. We also provide bounds on the area of separating CMC surfaces of bounded (Morse) index and use this, together with the previous results, to bound their genus.
We characterize the first min-max width of real projective spaces of any dimension. The width is the minimum area over the Clifford hypersurfaces. We also compute the Morse index of the Clifford hypersurfaces in the complex and quaternionic projective spaces.
We prove the multiplicity one theorem for min-max free boundary minimal hypersurfaces in compact manifolds with boundary of dimension between 3 and 7 for generic metrics. To approach this, we develop existence and regularity theory for free boundary hypersurface with prescribed mean curvature, which includes the regularity theory for minimizers, compactness theory, and a generic min-max theory with Morse index bounds. As applications, we construct new free boundary minimal hypersurfaces in the unit balls in Euclidean spaces and self-shrinkers of the mean curvature flows with arbitrarily large …
The purpose of this paper is to study a complete orientable minimal hypersurface with finite index in an $(n+1)$-dimensional Riemannian manifold $N$. We generalize Theorems 1.5-1.6 (\cite{Seo14}). In 1976, Schoen and Yau proved the Liouville type theorem on stable minimal hypersurface, i.e., Theorem 1.7 (\cite{SchoenYau1976}). Recently, Seo (\cite{Seo14}) generalized Theorem 1.7 (\cite{SchoenYau1976}). Finally, we generalize Theorems 1.7 (\cite{SchoenYau1976}) and 1.8 (\cite{Seo14})
We generalize a method by L. Ambrozio, A. Carlotto, and B. Sharp to study the Morse index of closed f-minimal hypersurfaces isometrically immersed in a general weighted manifold. The technique permits, in particular, to obtain a linear lower bound on the Morse index via the first Betti number for closed f-minimal hypersurfaces in products of some compact rank one symmetric spaces with an Euclidean factor, endowed with the rigid shrinking gradient Ricci soliton structure. These include, as particular cases, all cylindric shrinking gradient Ricci solitons.
In this paper, we prove that a noncompact complete hypersurface with finite weighted volume, weighted mean curvature vector bounded in norm, and isometrically immersed in a complete weighted manifold is proper. In addition, we obtain an estimate for $f$-stability index of a constant weighted mean curvature hypersurface with finite weighted volume and isometrically immersed in a shrinking gradient Ricci soliton that admits at least one parallel field globally defined. For such hypersurface, we still give a necessary condition for equality to be achieved in the estimate obtained.
In this paper, we consider immersed two-sided minimal hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{R}^n$ with finite total curvature. We prove that the sum of the Morse index and the nullity of the Jacobi operator is bounded from below by a linear function of the number of ends and the first Betti number of the hypersurface. When $n=4$, we are able to drop the nullity term by a careful study for the rigidity case. Our result is the first effective generalization of Li-Wang. Using our index estimates and ideas from the recent work of Chodosh-Ketover-Maximo, we prove compactness and finiteness results of minimal h…
We study the Morse index of self-shrinkers for the mean curvature flow and, more generally, of $f$-minimal hypersurfaces in a weighted Euclidean space endowed with a convex weight. When the hypersurface is compact, we show that the index is bounded from below by an affine function of its first Betti number. When the first Betti number is large, this improves index estimates known in literature. In the complete non-compact case, the lower bound is in terms of the dimension of the space of weighted square summable $f$-harmonic $1$-forms; in particular, in dimension $2$, the procedure gives an in…
Let $(M,\bar{g}, e^{-f}dμ)$ be a complete metric measure space with Bakry-Émery Ricci curvature bounded below by a positive constant. We prove that, in $M$, there is no complete two-sided $L_f$-stable immersed $f$-minimal hypersurface with finite weighted volume. Further, if $M$ is a 3-manifold, we prove a smooth compactness theorem for the space of complete embedded $f$-minimal surfaces in $M$ with the uniform upper bounds of genus and weighted volume, which generalizes the compactness theorem for complete self-shrinkers in $\mathbb{R}^3$ by Colding-Minicozzi.
We find many examples of compact Riemannian manifolds $(M,g)$ whose closed minimal hypersurfaces satisfy a lower bound on their index that is linear in their first Betti number. Moreover, we show that these bounds remain valid when the metric $g$ is replaced with $g'$ in a neighbourhood of $g$. Our examples $(M,g)$ consist of certain minimal isoparametric hypersurfaces of spheres; their focal manifolds; the Lie groups $SU(n)$ for $n\leq 17$, and $Sp(n)$ for all $n$; and all quaternionic Grassmannians.
We generalize the transgression formula for the eta form of Bismut, Cheeger and Berline, Getzler, Vergne for vertical Dirac operators on a fibre bundle with odd dimensional fibres where the Dirac operators have locally at most one eigenvalue of multiplicity one crossing zero transversally.
We prove a structural theorem that provides a precise local picture of how a sequence of closed embedded minimal hypersurfaces with uniformly bounded index (and volume if the ambient dimension is greater than three) in a Riemannian manifold of dimension at most seven, can degenerate. Loosely speaking, our results show that embedded minimal hypersurfaces with bounded index behave qualitatively like embedded stable minimal hypersurfaces, up to controlled errors. Several compactness/finiteness theorems follows our local picture.
In this article we study the second variation of the energy functional associated to the Allen-Cahn equation on closed manifolds. Extending well known analogies between the gradient theory of phase transitions and the theory of minimal hypersurfaces, we prove the upper semicontinuity of the eigenvalues of the stability operator and consequently obtain upper bounds for the Morse index of limit interfaces which arise from solutions with bounded energy and index without assuming any multiplicity or orientability condition on these hypersurfaces. This extends some recent results of N. Le and F. Hi…
