Area bounds for minimal surfaces that pass through a prescribed point in a ball (Q529611)

In this paper the authors study the area of a minimal submanifold in the unit ball in \(\mathbb{R}^n\). The main result is the following Theorem 2. Let \(\Sigma\) be a \(k\)-dimensional minimal submanifold in the unit ball \(B^n\) which passes through a point \(y\in B^n\) and satisfies \(\partial\Sigma\subset\partial B^n\). Then the area is \(|\Sigma|\geq|B^k|(1-|y|^2)^{k/2}\). Moreover, the inequality is strict unless \(\Sigma\) is a flat \(k\)-dimensional disk which is orthogonal to \(y\). This settles a question left open by the work of \textit{H. Alexander} and \textit{R. Osserman} [Am. J. Math. 97, 753--769 (1975; Zbl 0326.53030)]. A similar technique was used in [the first author, Geom. Funct. Anal. 22, No. 3, 621--626 (2012; Zbl 1266.53009)]. The main difficulty is to find some correct vector field.