Minmax Hierarchies, Minimal Fibrations and a PDE based Proof of the Willmore Conjecture

Abstract

We introduce a general scheme that permits to generate successive min-max problems for producing critical points of higher and higher indices to Palais-Smale Functionals in normal Banach manifolds equipped with complete Finsler structures. We call the resulting tree of minmax problems a minmax hierarchy. We give several examples and in particular we explain how to implement this scheme in the framework of the viscosity method introduced by the author some years ago in order to give a new proof of the Willmore conjecture after the famous result by Marques and Neves.