Minimal hypersurfaces with bounded index (Q2407541)

The authors prove a structural theorem, providing a local picture of how a sequence of closed embedded minimal hypersurfaces with uniformly bounded index (and volume if the ambient dimension is greater than three) in a Riemannian manifold \((M^n,g),\;3\leq n\leq7\), can degenerate. The results show that embedded minimal hypersurfaces with bounded index behave qualitatively like embedded stable minimal hypersurfaces, up to controlled errors. Several compactness/finiteness theorems follow from the local picture. In Section~1, the authors formulate and discuss the main and related results. Section~2 contains the definitions and proofs of curvature bounds away from finitely many points for hypersurfaces with bounded index. Section 3 presents a key result to control the topology of the ``intermediate regions'', assuming a curvature bound of the appropriate form. The local picture of degeneration in three-manifolds is established in Section 4 and the surgery result in Section 5. These results are helpful to obtain the three-dimensional compactness results in Section 6 and to prove the higher dimensional results in Section 7. Some necessary definitions, facts and examples are given in Appendices A-E.