Intersections of minimal submanifolds (Q757864)

The subject of the paper are minimal submanifolds in open Riemannian manifolds of nonnegative sectional or Ricci curvature. It starts out from the simple observation that a convex function in a Riemannian manifold is subharmonic on any (immersed) minimal submanifold. In an open manifold N of nonnegative sectional curvature, there are lots of convex functions, namely the Busemann functions, and moreover, on a convex subset, the distance from the boundary is convex. This has strong consequences for minimal submanifolds in such spaces. E.g., the following results are derived: (1) If a compact minimal submanifold or a parabolic minimal surface in N intersects the soul, it is contained in the soul; otherwise, it lies in the boundary of a convex set. (Conjecture of the reviewer: If a compact minimal submanifold does not intersect the soul, it is isometric to a covering of a minimal submanifold of the soul.) (2) Any compact minimal submanifold avoids the points of strictly positive curvature. If the sectional curvature is strictly positive outside a compact subset of N, no such submanifolds (other than points) can exist. Similar results hold for complete parabolic minimal surfaces. The reason is that Busemann functions are strictly convex near points of positive curvature, so their restrictions to minimal surfaces are strictly subharmonic and cannot admit maxima. The last chapter is devoted to minimal surfaces in a 3-manifold N of nonnegative Ricci curvature. In particular, the authors generalize some results of Meeks et al. on complete minimal surfaces in Euclidean 3-space. If N has bounded sectional curvature and injectivity radius, they get: (3) A complete parabolic minimal surface is either totally geodesic or intersects any other complete minimal surface. (4) The fundamental group of a properly immersed complete parabolic minimal surface M is mapped surjectively onto the fundamental group of N unless M is totally geodesic.