In this paper, we prove a general existence theorem for properly embedded minimal surfaces with free boundary in any compact Riemannian 3‐manifold M with boundary ∂M. These minimal surfaces are either disjoint from ∂M or meet ∂M orthogonally. The main feature of our result is that there is no assumptions on the curvature of M or convexity of ∂M. We prove the boundary regularity of the minimal surfaces at their free boundaries. Furthermore, we define a topological invariant, the filling genus, for compact 3‐manifolds with boundary and show that we can bound the genus of the minimal surface constructed above in terms of the filling genus of the ambient manifold M. Our proof employs a variant of the min‐max construction used by Colding and De Lellis on closed embedded minimal surfaces, which were first developed by Almgren and Pitts.

In this paper, we prove uniform curvature estimates for immersed stable free boundary minimal hypersurfaces satisfying a uniform area bound, which generalize the celebrated Schoen–Simon–Yau interior curvature estimates up to the free boundary. Our curvature estimates imply a smooth compactness theorem which is an essential ingredient in the min-max theory of free boundary minimal hypersurfaces developed by the last two authors. We also prove a monotonicity formula for free boundary minimal submanifolds in Riemannian manifolds for any dimension and codimension. For 3-manifolds with boundary, we prove a stronger curvature estimate for properly embedded stable free boundary minimal surfaces without a-priori area bound. This generalizes Schoen’s interior curvature estimates to the free boundary setting. Our proof uses the theory of minimal laminations developed by Colding and Minicozzi.

The deformation theory of hyperbolic and Euclidean cone-manifolds with all cone angles less than 2 plays an important role in many problems in low-dimensional topology and in the geometrization of 3-manifolds. Furthermore, various old conjectures dating back to Stoker about the moduli space of convex hyperbolic and Euclidean polyhedra can be reduced to the study of deformations of cone-manifolds by doubling a polyhedron across its faces. This deformation theory has been understood by Hodgson and Kerckhoff [7] when the singular set has no vertices, and by Weiß [32] when the cone angles are less than . We prove here an infinitesimal rigidity result valid for cone angles less than 2, stating that infinitesimal deformations which leave the dihedral angles fixed are trivial in the hyperbolic case, and reduce to some simple deformations in the Euclidean case. The method is to treat this as a problem concerning the deformation theory of singular Einstein metrics, and to apply analytic methods about elliptic operators on stratified spaces. This work is an important ingredient in the local deformation theory of cone-manifolds by the second author [22]; see also the concurrent work by Weiß [33].

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Contrast to the hyperbolic mean curvature flows studied in [HKL], [LS], and [KW], a new hyperbolic curvature flow is proposed for convex hypersurfaces. This flow is most suited when the Gauss curvature is involved. The equation satisfied by the graph of the hypersurface under this flow gives rise to a new class of fully nonlinear Euclidean invariant hyperbolic equations.