Cylindrical tangent cones and the singular set of minimal submanifolds (Q1312141)

The results of this paper are of importance for the question of what can be said about the structure of the singular set of minimal surfaces and the extrema of other geometric variational problems. The author proves rectifiability of local finiteness of measure of the singular set of various classes of minimal submanifolds. One of the results established here is the \((n-2)\)-rectifiability for the interior singular set of any \(\text{mod }2\)-minimizing current or arbitrary codimension, and local finiteness for the \((n-2)\)-dimensional measure of the ``top-dimensional'' part of this singular set. The key result is a technical lemma which says that either ones gets ``excess improvement'' or else there is a significant gap in the singular set. The proof of this lemma is based on a variant of the ``blow up method'', a technique going back to De Giorgi in his work on area minimizing surfaces, and first used in a context where ``integrability hypotheses'' play a role by \textit{W. K. Allard} and \textit{F. J. Almgren jun.} [Ann. Math., II. Ser. 113, 215-265 (1981; Zbl 0449.53041)]. The results presented here are valid for multiplicity one classes of minimal submanifolds of an arbitrary complete Riemannian manifold. They also have applications to energy minimizing mappings between Riemannian manifolds. Since the publication of this paper the author has presented improvements of some of these results with simplified proofs where the ``integrability hypothesis'' is no longer needed (preprint).