Minimal hypersurfaces of least area (Q1700289): Difference between revisions

This article adresses the existence of minimal hypersurfaces of least area among all minimal hypersurfaces. The main theorem of the paper (Theorem A) asserts that for a closed oriented Riemannian manifold \(M\) of dimension \(3\leq n\leq 7\), the minimum of the area function \(\mathcal{A}_1(M)\) -- the infimum over the areas of all connected, closed minimal hypersurfaces with areas of non-orientable surfaces doubled -- is realized by some minimal hypersurface. Moreover, the theorem broadly characterizes the minimal hypersurfaces which can achieve the minimum. The second section of the paper reviews some basic facts about minimal hypersurfaces, in particular the stability operator. Section 3 discusses some prerequisites concerning min-max theory. In particular, it discusses the construction of a certain minimal hypersurface using the min-max method with area a particular positive number \(W_M\) (called the width of \(M\)). Section 4 deals with the restricted case of stable minimal surfaces. The minimum \(\mathcal{A}_{\mathcal{S}}(M)\) is defined analogously to \(\mathcal{A}_1(M)\), by restricting only to the stable hypersurfaces and it is shown that this minimum is actually achieved by a minimal hypersurface. Section 6 contains the proof of the main theorem. The heart of the proof rests on showing that \(\mathcal{A}_1(M)=\min\{\mathcal{A}_{\mathcal{S}}(M),W_M\}\) and the claim then follows from the results of Section 5 and Section 4. The paper concludes with two sections which discuss the particular case when \(M\) is a 3-manifold. The final section provides a lower bound for minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 3-manifolds.