Regularity and compactness for stable CMC hypersurfaces

Costante Bellettini, UCL. Part of the analysis and applications seminar series

This talk describes a recent joint work of the speaker with N. Wickramasekera (Cambridge). The work develops a regularity theory,  with an associated compactness theorem, for weakly defined hypersurfaces (codimension 1 integral varifolds) of a smooth Riemannian manifold that are stationary and stable on their regular parts for volume preserving ambient deformations.

The main regularity theorem gives two structural conditions on such a hypersurface that imply that, away from a set of codimension 7 or higher, the hypersurface is locally either a single smoothly embedded disk or precisely two smoothly embedded disks intersecting tangentially. Easy examples show that neither structural hypothesis can be relaxed.

An important special case is when the varifold corresponds to the boundary of a Caccioppoli set, in which case the structural conditions can be considerably weakened. An "effective version" of the compactness theorem has been (a posteriori) established in collaboration with O. Chodosh and N. Wickramasekera.