On the mean exit time from a minimal submanifold (Q1098467)

Let M m be an immersed minimal submanifold of a Riemannian manifold N n, and consider the Brownian motion on a regular ball \(\Omega _ R\subset M\) with exterior radius R. The mean exit time for the motion from a point \(x\in \Omega _ R\) is called \(E_ R(x)\). In this paper we find sharp functions for \(E_ R(x)\) in the following distinct cases. The support is from below if the sectional curvatures of N are bounded from below by a nonnegative constant and the support is from above if the sectional curvatures of N are bounded from above by a nonpositive constant. It follows that the minimal submanifolds of R n all have the same mean exit time function and we show that this function actually characterizes the minimal hypersurfaces in the set of all hypersurfaces of R n.