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We prove a lower bound for the first Steklov eigenvalue of embedded minimal hypersurfaces with free boundary in a compact n-dimensional Riemannian manifold which has nonnegative Ricci curvature and strictly convex boundary. When n=3, this implies an apriori curvature estimate for these minimal surfaces in terms of the geometry of the ambient manifold and the topology of the minimal surface. An important consequence of the estimate is a smooth compactness theorem for embedded minimal surfaces with free boundary when the topological type of these minimal surfaces is fixed.

In this note, we study submanifold geometry of the Atiyah--Hitchin manifold, a double cover of the 2-monopole moduli space, which plays an important role in various settings such as the supersymmetric background of string theory. When the manifold is naturally identified as the total space of a line bundle over S^2, the zero section is a distinguished minimal 2-sphere of considerable interest. In particular, there has been a conjecture about the uniqueness of this minimal 2-sphere among all closed minimal 2-surfaces. We show that this minimal 2-sphere satisfies the ``strong stability condition" proposed in our earlier work, and confirm the global uniqueness as a corollary.

We prove that a compact Riemannian 3-symmetric space is globally symmetric if every Jacobi field along a geodesic vanishing at two points is the restriction to that geodesic of a Killing field induced by the isotropy action or, in particular, if the isotropy action is variationally complete.

Given a negatively curved geodesic metric space M, we study the almost sure asymptotic penetration behavior of (locally) geodesic lines of M into small neighborhoods of points, of closed geodesics, and of other compact (locally) convex subsets of M. We prove Khintchine-type and logarithm law-type results for the spiraling of geodesic lines around these objets. As a consequence in the tree setting, we obtain Diophantine approximation results of elements of non-archimedian local fields by quadratic irrational ones.