Minimal hyperspheres of arbitrarily large Morse index

Abstract

We show that the Morse index of a closed minimal hypersurface in a four-dimensional Riemannian manifold cannot be bound in terms of the volume and the topological invariants of the hypersurface itself by presenting a method for constructing Riemannian metrics on S^4 that admit embedded minimal hyperspheres of uniformly bounded volume and arbitrarily large Morse index. The phenomena we exhibit are in striking contrast with the three-dimensional compactness results by Choi-Schoen.