Construction of minimal annuli in \(\widetilde{\mathrm{PSL}}_2(\mathbb{R},\tau)\) via a variational method (Q6084223)

The problem of constructing complete minimal surfaces of controlled topology in the Euclidean \(3\)-space \(\mathbb{R}^3\) has been extensively studied for decades. A natural extension of this problem is to find minimal surfaces in other simply connected homogeneous \(3\)-spaces. Earlier works have treated the case of the Riemannian product of the hyperbolic plane with the real line \(\mathbb{H}^2\times \mathbb{R}\). In this paper, the authors are interested in the homogeneous \(3\)-spaces \(\widetilde{\mathrm{PSL}}_2(\mathbb{R},\tau)\) where \(\tau\in \mathbb{R}\) is a parameter determining the metric: those spaces lie in a family of homogeneous \(3\)-spaces containing \(\mathbb{H}^2\times \mathbb{R}\) and the \(3\)-dimensional Heisenberg group, each \(\widetilde{\mathrm{PSL}}_2(\mathbb{R},\tau)\) is the universal cover of the Lie group \(\mathrm{PSL}_2(\mathbb{R},\tau)\) endowed with a left-invariant metric, and \(\widetilde{\mathrm{PSL}}_2(\mathbb{R},\tau)\) admits a Riemannian submersion over the hyperbolic plane, whose fibers are geodesics. The authors show the existence of many complete, embedded, minimal annuli in \(\widetilde{\mathrm{PSL}}_2(\mathbb{R},\tau)\), and construct minimal surfaces of genus \(0\) analogous to the well-known Riemann staircase examples in \(\mathbb{R}^3\). To construct minimal annuli without boundary or with nontrivial boundary, the authors rely mostly on direct variational arguments together with compactness arguments, but they also use some degree theory. They first construct a compact minimal annulus \(\Sigma_n\) with a fixed boundary \(\Gamma_n\) chosen thanks to the geometry of \(\widetilde{\mathrm{PSL}}_2(\mathbb{R},\tau)\). Then, they take limits of those surfaces by letting the size of \(\Gamma_n\) tend to infinity, and prove that the topology is preserved in the limit. To construct the analogues of the Riemann staircase examples, they apply the Schwarz reflection trick to extend some particular minimal annuli with nontrivial boundary.