We prove the nonexistence of stable immersed minimal surfaces uniformly conformally equivalent to $ \mathbb{C}$ in any complete orientable four-dimensional Riemannian manifold with uniformly positive isotropic curvature. We also generalize the same nonexistence result to higher dimensions provided that the ambient manifold has uniformly positive complex sectional curvature. The proof consists of two parts: assuming an ``eigenvalue condition'' on the $ \overline {\partial }$-operator of a holomorphic bundle, we prove (1) a vanishing theorem for these holomorphic bundles on $ \mathbb{C}$ and (2) an existence theorem for holomorphic sections with controlled growth by Hörmander's weighted $L^2$-method.

We construct a new family of high genus examples of free boundary minimal surfaces in the Euclidean unit 3-ball by desingularizing the intersection of a coaxial pair of a critical catenoid and an equatorial disk. The surfaces are constructed by singular perturbation methods and have three boundary components. They are the free boundary analogue of the Costa-Hoffman-Meeks surfaces and the surfaces constructed by Kapouleas by desingularizing coaxial catenoids and planes. It is plausible that the minimal surfaces we constructed here are the same as the ones obtained recently by Ketover using the min-max method.

Let M be a compact n-dimensional Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature and mean convex boundary ∂M. Assume that the mean curvature H of the boundary ∂M satisfies H≥(n−1)k>0 for some positive constant k. In this paper, we prove that the distance function d to the boundary ∂M is bounded from above by 1/𝑘 and the upper bound is achieved if and only if M is isometric to an n-dimensional Euclidean ball of radius 1/𝑘.

In 1960s, Almgren initiated a program to find minimal hypersurfaces in compact manifolds using min-max method. This program was largely advanced by Pitts and Schoen-Simon in 1980s when the manifold has no boundary. In this paper, we finish this program for general compact manifold with nonempty boundary. As a result, we prove the existence of a smooth embedded minimal hypersurface with free boundary in any compact smooth Euclidean domain. An application of our general existence result combined with the work of Marques and Neves shows that for any compact Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature and convex boundary, there exist infinitely many embedded minimal hypersurfaces with free boundary which are properly embedded.

For almost all Riemannian metrics (in the C1 Baire sense) on a closed manifold M^{n+1}, 3 \leq n + 1 \leq 7, we prove that there is a sequence of closed, smooth, embedded, connected minimal hypersurfaces that is equidistributed in M. This gives a quantitative version of a result by Irie and the first two authors, that established density of minimal hypersurfaces for generic metrics. The main tool is the Weyl Law for the Volume Spectrum proven by Liokumovich and the first two authors .