Existence and partial regularity of Legendrian area-minimizing currents (Q7299646)

The author lays the foundations of regularity theory of area-minimizing Legendrian integral currents in contact manifolds of arbitrary dimension. The main motivation comes from the project initiated by \textit{R. Schoen} and \textit{J. Wolfson} to develop a variational theory for the area of Lagrangian submanifolds in symplectic manifolds [Proc. Symp. Pure Math. 65, 181--199 (1999; Zbl 1031.53112); J. Differ. Geom. 58, No. 1, 1--86 (2001; Zbl 1052.53056); New Stud. Adv. Math. 2, 181--192 (2003; Zbl 1052.53057)].\N\NThe classical Plateau problem concerns finding a surface of least area with a given boundary. The Legendrian Plateau problem is a version of the Plateau problem where the solution must respect a contact structure. Let \({\mathbb{H}}^n\) denote the Heisenberg group of topological dimension \(2n+1\) with its standard contact structure and subriemannian metric on the horizontal planes. A horizontal integral current in \({\mathbb{H}}^n\) is then an integral current almost all of whose tangent planes are isotropic. A Legendrian current is a horizontal current of dimension \(n\). The author proves the existence and partial regularity of solutions of the Legendrian Plateau problem in \({\mathbb{H}}^n\) for an arbitrary horizontal \((n-1)\)-cycle as the boundary. He also proves that there exist mass-minimizing Legendrian integral currents in any \(n\)-dimensional homology class of a closed contact \((2n+1)\)-manifold. He plans to apply his results to study variational problems for Lagrangian surfaces.