Counting minimal surfaces in negatively curved 3-manifolds (Q2671475)

A classical result in geometry states that on a closed locally symmetric Riemannian manifold \((M,h_0)\) with strictly negative curvature, if \(h\) is another Riemannian metric on \(M\) with negative curvature and with the same volume as \(h_0\), then the following quantity \[ \delta(h):=\lim_{L\to\infty}\frac{1}{L}\ln \sharp\{\mathrm{length}_h(\gamma)\leq L:~\gamma\text{ is~ a closed geodesic in }(M,h)\} \] satisfies an inequality \(\delta(h)\geq \delta(h_0)\) with equality if and only if \(h\) is isometric to \(h_0\). Recently many great progress has been made on the existence of minimal surfaces, which are higher dimensional analogue of closed geodesics. In the paper under review, the authors introduce an asymptotic quantity \[ E(h)=\lim_{\varepsilon\to 0}\liminf_{L\to\infty}\frac{1}{L\ln L}\ln\sharp\{\text{area}_h(\Pi)\leq 4\pi (L-1):~\Pi\in S_\varepsilon(M)\} \] to count the area-minimizing surfaces in a negatively curved closed \(3\)-manifold \((M,h)\) in the spirit of the case of closed geodesics, where \(S_\varepsilon(M)=\bigcup_{g\in \mathbb{N}}S(M,g,\varepsilon)\) for the set of \(\varepsilon\)-Fuchsian surface subgroups of genus at most \(g\) up to the conjugacy. The authors show that this quantity is minimized among the set of metrics with sectional curvature \(\leq -1\) by the hyperbolic metric \(\bar{h}\); that is, there holds \(E(h)\geq E(\bar{h})\) for metrics \(h\) with sectional curvature \(\leq -1\) and the equality holds if and only if \(h\) is the hyperbolic metric \(\bar{h}\). This is the first result on the asymptotical rigidity for areas of minimal surfaces.