Mountain Pass Critical Points of the Volume Constrained Area Functional

Abstract

We construct mountain pass critical points of the perimeter functional on sets of fixed volume. For a generic metric, this gives rise to a smooth almost embedded hypersurface with non-zero constant mean curvature. Our work utilizes recent techniques of Mazurwoski--Zhou \cite{mazurowski2024infinitely}, and a new result on the connectedness of Cacciopoli sets: any two smooth Cacciopoli sets can be connected by an $\mathbf{F}$-continuous map.