Renormalized volumes with boundary

We develop a general regulated volume expansion for the volume of a manifold with boundary whose measure is suitably singular along a separating hypersurface. The expansion is shown to have a regulator independent anomaly term and a renormalized volume term given by the primitive of an associated anomaly operator. These results apply to a wide range of structures. We detail applications in the setting of measures derived from a conformally singular metric. In particular, we show that the anomaly generates invariant ([Formula: see text]-curvature, transgression)-type pairs for hypersurfaces with boundary. For the special case of anomalies coming from the volume enclosed by a minimal hypersurface ending on the boundary of a Poincaré–Einstein structure, this result recovers Branson’s [Formula: see text]-curvature and corresponding transgression. When the singular metric solves a boundary version of the constant scalar curvature Yamabe problem, the anomaly gives generalized Willmore energy functionals for hypersurfaces with boundary. Our approach yields computational algorithms for all the above quantities, and we give explicit results for surfaces embedded in 3-manifolds.

Volume of minimal hypersurfaces in manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature

We establish a min-max estimate on the volume width of a closed Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature. More precisely, we show that every closed Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature admits a PL Morse function whose level set volume is bounded in terms of the volume of the manifold. As a consequence of this sweep-out estimate, there exists an embedded, closed (possibly singular) minimal hypersurface whose volume is bounded in terms of the volume of the manifold.

Complete hypersurfaces with constant Möbius scalar curvature

Let [Formula: see text] be an umbilical free hypersurface in the unit sphere [Formula: see text]. Four basic invariants of [Formula: see text], under the Möbius transformation group of [Formula: see text] are the Möbius metric [Formula: see text], the Möbius second fundamental form [Formula: see text], the Blaschke tensor [Formula: see text] and the Möbius form [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we study complete hypersurfaces with constant normalized Möbius scalar curvature [Formula: see text] and vanishing Möbius form [Formula: see text]. By computing the Laplacian of the funtion [Formula: see text], where the trace-free Blaschke tensor [Formula: see text], and applying the well known generalized maximum principle of Omori–Yau, we obtain the following result: [Formula: see text] must be either Möbius equivalent to a minimal hypersurface with constant Möbius scalar curvature, when [Formula: see text]; [Formula: see text] in [Formula: see text], when [Formula: see text]; the pre-image of the stereographic projection [Formula: see text] of the circular cylinder [Formula: see text] in [Formula: see text], when [Formula: see text]; or the pre-image of the projection [Formula: see text] of the hypersurface [Formula: see text] in [Formula: see text], when [Formula: see text].