Area and spectrum estimates for stable minimal surfaces

Abstract

This note concerns the area growth and bottom spectrum of complete stable minimal surfaces in a three-dimensional manifold with scalar curvature bounded from below. When the ambient manifold is the Euclidean space, by an elementary argument, it is shown directly from the stability inequality that the area of such minimal surfaces grows exactly as the Euclidean plane. Consequently, such minimal surfaces must be at, a well-known result due to Fisher-Colbrie and Schoen as well as do Carmo and Peng. In the case the ambient manifold is the hyperbolic space, explicit area growth estimate is also derived. For the bottom spectrum, upper bound estimates are established in terms of the scalar curvature lower bound of the ambient manifold.