Capillary minimal slicing and scalar curvature rigidity

Abstract

We develop minimal slicing via capillary hypersurfaces to understand positive scalar curvature metric on manifolds with boundary. The method provides rigidity statements once the regularity of minimizers of capillary area functional holds. In particular, in dimension $4$, we prove following comparison and rigidity statement: given a compact Riemannian $4$-manifold $(M^4,g)$ with a mean convex boundary whose boundary is diffeomorphic to boundary of a connected convex domain in $\mathbb R^4$, if the scalar curvature is non-negative and the scaled mean curvature comparison holds along the boundary, then $M$ is isometric to the Euclidean domain.