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.

We study generalized Hopf–Cole transformations motivated by the Schrödinger bridge problem, which can be seen as a boundary value Hamiltonian system on the Wasserstein space. We prove that generalized Hopf–Cole transformations are symplectic submersions in the Wasserstein symplectic geometry. Many examples, including a Hopf–Cole transformation for the shallow water equations, are given. Based on this transformation, energy splitting inequalities are provided.

We prove higher regularity properties of inverse mean curvature flow in Euclidean space: A sharp lower bound for the mean curvature is derived for star-shaped surfaces, independently of the initial mean curvature. It is also shown that solutions to the inverse mean curvature flow are smooth if the mean curvature is bounded from below. As a consequence we show that weak solutions of the inverse mean curvature flow are smooth for large times,beginning from the first time where a surface in the evolution is star-shaped.

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We determine a global structure of the moduli space of self-dual metrics on 3CP2 satisfying the following three properties: (i) the scalar curvature is of positive type, (ii) they admit a non-trivial Killing field, (iii) they are not conformal to the LeBrun’s self- dual metrics based on the ‘hyperbolic ansatz’. We prove that the moduli space of these metrics is isomorphic to an orbifold R3/G, where G is an involution of R3 having two-dimensional fixed locus. In particular, the moduli space is non-empty and connected. We also remark that Joyce’s self-dual metrics with torus symmetry appear as a limit of our self-dual metrics. Our proof of the result is based on the twistor theory. We first determine a defining equation of a projective model of the twistor space of the metric, and then prove that the projective model is always birational to a twistor space, by determining the family of twistor lines. In determining them, a key role is played by a classical result in algebraic geometry that a smooth plane quartic always possesses twenty-eight bitangents.