Some recent trends in calibrated geometries (Q1409797)

Let \(M\) be a Riemannian manifold of dimension \(n\), let \(S\) be a compact oriented \(k\)-dimensional submanifold of \(M\) (\(k<n\)) and let \(\phi\) be a closed differential \(k\)-form on \(M\) satisfying \(\phi(\xi)\leq 1\) for any unit tangent simple \(k\)-covector \(\xi\) of \(M\) and \(\phi(\xi)=1\) whenever \(\xi\) is tangent to \(S\). Then, \(\phi\) is called a calibration, \((M,\phi)\) a calibrated manifold and \(S\) a submanifold which is calibrated by \(\phi\). In this paper, the authors survey some recent developments in the theory of calibration. The paper is divided into four parts: (i) Computing the maximal direction of a \(k\)-form, (ii) the Cartesian product problem, (iii) the classification problem and (iv) calibrations for the globally length-minimizing Steiner networks.