Compact stable hypersurfaces with free boundary in convex solid cones with homogeneous densities (Q471111)

Let \((M^{n+1}, g, f)\) be a Riemannian manifold with density, that is a connected Riemannian manifold \((M^{n+1},g)\) taken together with a \(C^\infty\)-smooth function \(f=e^\psi\) used to weight the Hausdorff measure associated to the Riemannian distance. Particularly, the weighted volume \(V_f\) of a Borel set \(\Omega \subset M^{n+1}\) and the weighted area \(A_f\) of a piecewise smooth hypersurface \(\Sigma \subset M^{n+1}\) relative to the interior \(\text{int} M\) of \(M^{n+1}\) are defined as \[ V_f(\Omega) = \int\limits_{\Omega} f \, dV_g\,,\,\,\,\, A_f(\Sigma) = \int \limits_{\Sigma \cap \text{int} M} f \, dA_g. \] For a Riemannian manifold with density \(f = e^\psi\), and for any \(k\neq 0\), \(k\)-dimensional Bakry-Émery-Ricci tensor is given by \[ \text{Ric}^k_f:=\text{Ric} - \nabla^2 \psi - \frac{1}{k} d \psi \otimes d \psi. \] Recall that a hypersurface \(\Sigma \subset (M^{n+1},g,f)\) is called \(f\)-stable if the second-order derivative of the weighted area functional is nonnegative under compactly supported variations preserving \(\partial M^{n+1}\) and the weighted volume separated by \(\Sigma\). In this paper, the authors focus on the case when \(M^{n+1}=M\) is a convex solid cone of \(\mathbb R^{n+1}\), and \(f\) is a \(k\)-homogeneous density, that is a positive function whose restriction to any open segment of the cone emanating from the vertex is a monomial of degree \(k\). In such a setting, they prove that \textit{the only smooth compact orientable \(f\)-stable hypersurface \(\Sigma\) in \(M\) is the intersection of the cone with the round sphere centered at the vertex, provided that \(\text{Ric}^k_f \geqslant 0\) and either \(k < -n\) and \(\Sigma\) lies in a punctured cone, or \(k > 0\)}. The idea of the proof follows lines similar to those of the classical result due to Barbosa and do Carmo on stability of CMC hypersurfaces in Riemannian manifolds. Besides the main result, the authors give a short overview of the existing results in the field, extend the classical divergence theorem to manifolds with densities, and present some classification results for compact strongly \(f\)-stable hypersurfaces in the same setting.