The viscosity method for min-max free boundary minimal surfaces

Abstract

We adapt the viscosity method introduced by Rivi\`ere to the free boundary case. Namely, given a compact oriented surface $\Sigma$, possibly with boundary, a closed ambient Riemannian manifold $(\mathcal{M}^m,g)$ and a closed embedded submanifold $\mathcal{N}^n\subset\mathcal{M}$, we study the asymptotic behavior of (almost) critical maps $\Phi$ for the functional \begin{align*} &E_\sigma(\Phi):=\operatorname{area}(\Phi)+\sigma\operatorname{length}(\Phi|_{\partial\Sigma})+\sigma^4\int_\Sigma|{\mathrm {I\!I}}^\Phi|^4\,\operatorname{vol}_\Phi \end{align*} on immersions $\Phi:\Sigma\to\mathcal{M}$ with the constraint $\Phi(\partial\Sigma)\subseteq\mathcal{N}$, as $\sigma\to 0$, assuming an upper bound for the area and a suitable entropy condition. As a consequence, given any collection $\mathcal{F}$ of compact subsets of the space of smooth immersions $(\Sigma,\partial\Sigma)\to(\mathcal{M},\mathcal{N})$, assuming $\mathcal{F}$ to be stable under isotopies of this space we show that the min-max value \begin{align*} &\beta:=\inf_{A\in\mathcal{F}}\max_{\Phi\in A}\operatorname{area}(\Phi) \end{align*} is the sum of the areas of finitely many branched minimal immersions $\Phi_{(i)}:\Sigma_{(i)}\to\mathcal{M}$ with $\partial_\nu\Phi_{(i)}\perp T\mathcal{N}$ along $\partial\Sigma_{(i)}$, whose (connected) domains $\Sigma_{(i)}$ can be different from $\Sigma$ but cannot have a more complicated topology. We adopt a point of view which exploits extensively the diffeomorphism invariance of $E_\sigma$ and, along the way, we simplify several arguments from the original work. Some parts generalize to closed higher-dimensional domains, for which we get a rectifiable stationary varifold in the limit.