A variational characterization of complex submanifolds (Q330844)

The authors started to study, in their previous paper, the relationship between volume minimizers and holomorphic submanifolds of Kähler manifolds. They proved that the regular part of a union of injectively immersed surfaces is a chain of holomorphic submanifolds with possibly different orientations, and fixing such an object the area is constant on the set of potentials (hence it has infinitely many critical points). To obtain these results they were inspired by classical work of Lawson and Simons. Considering the two-dimensional case everything was represented by the Kähler angle which does not apply in high-dimensional cases. They expand now the setup mentioned above in various directions. To achieve this goal the authors study a new type of functionals \({\mathcal F}_c\) defined on the space of immersions, and use geometric measure theory. They prove for any dimension and codimension that if the mass of a current, as a functional of the ambient metric, has a critical or stable point in some special directions, then the current is complex. In the surface case, they compute the Euler-Lagrangian equation for \({\mathcal F}_c\) and prove that similarly to the minimal surface systems, the equation with \(c>1\) is weakly elliptic, with null directions coming from those directions tangential to the surface, i.e., the kernel of the principle symbol arises from the diffeomorphisms of the submanifold. They also conclude that any symplectic \({\mathcal F}_c\)-critical surface with \(c\geq 1\) in a Kähler-Einstein surface with positive scalar curvature must be holomorphic. Using numerous facts they succeed to connect well-known results with their main theorems to derive some interesting corollaries.