We study the Plateau Problem of finding an area minimizing disk bounding a given Jordan curve in Alexandrov spaces with curvature ≥ κ. These are complete metric spaces with a lower curvature bound given in terms of triangle comparison. Imposing an additional condition that is satisfied by all Alexandrov spaces according to a conjecture of Perel’man, we develop a harmonic map theory from two dimensional domains into these spaces. In particular, we show that the solution to the Dirichlet problem from a disk is H¨older continuous in the interior and continuous up to the boundary. Using this theory, we solve the Plateau Problem in this setting generalizing classical results in Euclidean space (due to J. Douglas and T. Rado) and in Riemannian manifolds (due to C.B. Morrey).

In this paper, we discuss the Weyl problem in warped product spaces. We apply the method of continuity and prove the openness of the Weyl problem. A counterexample is constructed to show that the isometric embedding of the sphere with canonical metric is not unique up to an isometry if the ambient warped product space is not a space form. Then, we study the rigidity of the standard sphere if we fix its geometric center in the ambient space. Finally, we discuss a Shi-Tam type of inequality for the Schwarzschild manifold as an application of our findings.

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A well-known conjecture of Yau states that the first eigenvalue of every closed minimal hypersurface Mn in the unit sphere S^(n+1)(1) is just its dimension n. The present paper shows that Yau conjecture is true for minimal isoparametric hypersurfaces. Moreover, the more fascinating result of this paper is that the first eigenvalues of the focal submanifolds are equal to their dimensions in the non-stable range.

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