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Tobias H. Colding

Publications and source records attributed to Tobias H. Colding.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2012

The space of embedded minimal surfaces of fixed genus in a 3-manifold V; Fixed genus

This paper is the fifth and final in a series on embedded minimal surfaces. Following our earlier papers on disks, we prove here two main structure theorems for non-simply connected embedded minimal surfaces of any given fixed genus. The first of these asserts that any such surface without small necks can be obtained by gluing together two oppositely--oriented double spiral staircases. The second gives a pair of pants decomposition of any such surface when there are small necks, cutting the surface along a collection of short curves. After the cutting, we are left with graphical pieces that are defined over a disk with either one or two sub--disks removed (a topological disk with two sub--disks removed is called a pair of pants). Both of these structures occur as different extremes in the two-parameter family of minimal surfaces known as the Riemann examples. The results of [CM3]--[CM6] have already been used by many authors; see, e.g., the surveys [MeP], [P], [Ro] and the introduction in [CM6] for some of these applications. There is much current research on minimal surfaces with infinite topology. Some of the results of the present paper were announced previously and have already been widely used to study infinite topology minimal surfaces; see, e.g., [MeP], [MePRs1], [MePRs2], [MePRs3], and [P].

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arXiv2011

Minimal surfaces and mean curvature flow

We discuss recent results on minimal surfaces and mean curvature flow, focusing on the classification and structure of embedded minimal surfaces and the stable singularities of mean curvature flow. This article is dedicated to Rick Schoen.

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arXiv2009

Generic mean curvature flow I; generic singularities

It has long been conjectured that starting at a generic smooth closed embedded surface in R^3, the mean curvature flow remains smooth until it arrives at a singularity in a neighborhood of which the flow looks like concentric spheres or cylinders. That is, the only singularities of a generic flow are spherical or cylindrical. We will address this conjecture here and in a sequel. The higher dimensional case will be addressed elsewhere. The key in showing this conjecture is to show that shrinking spheres, cylinders and planes are the only stable self-shrinkers under the mean curvature flow. We prove this here in all dimensions. An easy consequence of this is that every other singularity than spheres and cylinders can be perturbed away.

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arXiv2009

Smooth compactness of self-shrinkers

We prove a smooth compactness theorem for the space of embedded self-shrinkers in $\RR^3$. Since self-shrinkers model singularities in mean curvature flow, this theorem can be thought of as a compactness result for the space of all singularities and it plays an important role in studying generic mean curvature flow.

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arXiv2007

Width and finite extinction time of Ricci flow

This is an expository article with complete proofs intended for a general non-specialist audience. The results are two-fold. First, we discuss a geometric invariant, that we call the width, of a manifold and show how it can be realized as the sum of areas of minimal 2-spheres. For instance, when $M$ is a homotopy 3-sphere, the width is loosely speaking the area of the smallest 2-sphere needed to ``pull over'' $M$. Second, we use this to conclude that Hamilton's Ricci flow becomes extinct in finite time on any homotopy 3-sphere. We have chosen to write this since the results and ideas given here are quite useful and seem to be of interest to a wide audience.

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arXiv2007

Width and mean curvature flow

Given a Riemannian metric on a homotopy $n$-sphere, sweep it out by a continuous one-parameter family of closed curves starting and ending at point curves. Pull the sweepout tight by, in a continuous way, pulling each curve as tight as possible yet preserving the sweepout. We show: Each curve in the tightened sweepout whose length is close to the length of the longest curve in the sweepout must itself be close to a closed geodesic. In particular, there are curves in the sweepout that are close to closed geodesics. Finding closed geodesics on the 2-sphere by using sweepouts goes back to Birkhoff in 1917. As an application, we bound from above, by a negative constant, the rate of change of the width for a one-parameter family of convex hypersurfaces that flows by mean curvature. The width is loosely speaking up to a constant the square of the length of the shortest closed curve needed to ``pull over'' $M$. This estimate is sharp and leads to a sharp estimate for the extinction time; cf. [CM1], [CM2] where a similar bound for the rate of change for the two dimensional width is shown for homotopy 3-spheres evolving by the Ricci flow (see also Perelman).

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arXiv2007

Min-max for sweepouts by curves

Given a Riemannian metric on the 2-sphere, sweep the 2-sphere out by a continuous one-parameter family of closed curves starting and ending at point curves. Pull the sweepout tight by, in a continuous way, pulling each curve as tight as possible yet preserving the sweepout. We show the following useful property (see Theorem 1.9 below); cf. [CM1], [CM2], proposition 3.1 of [CD], proposition 3.1 of [Pi], and 12.5 of [Al]: Each curve in the tightened sweepout whose length is close to the length of the longest curve in the sweepout must itself be close to a closed geodesic. In particular, there are curves in the sweepout that are close to closed geodesics. Finding closed geodesics on the 2-sphere by using sweepouts goes back to Birkhoff in the 1920s. The above useful property is virtually always implicit in any sweepout construction of critical points for variational problems yet it is not always recorded since most authors are only interested in the existence of one critical point. Similar results holds for sweepouts by 2-spheres instead of circles; cf. \cite{CM2}. The ideas are essentially the same in the two cases, though technically easier for curves where there is no concentration of energy (i.e., ``bubbling''); cf. \cite{Jo}.

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arXiv2007

Three circles theorems for Schrodinger operators on cylindrical ends and geometric applications

We show that for a Schrödinger operator with bounded potential on a manifold with cylindrical ends the space of solutions which grows at most exponentially at infinity is finite dimensional and, for a dense set of potentials (or, equivalently for a surface, for a fixed potential and a dense set of metrics), the constant function zero is the only solution that vanishes at infinity. Clearly, for general potentials there can be many solutions that vanish at infinity. These results follow from a three circles inequality (or log convexity inequality) for the Sobolev norm of a solution $u$ to a Schrödinger equation on a product $N\times [0,T]$, where $N$ is a closed manifold with a certain spectral gap. Examples of such $N$'s are all (round) spheres $\SS^n$ for $n\geq 1$ and all Zoll surfaces. Finally, we discuss some examples arising in geometry of such manifolds and Schrödinger operators.

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arXiv2006

The Calabi-Yau conjectures for embedded surfaces

In this paper we will prove the Calabi-Yau conjectures for embedded surfaces. In fact, we will prove considerably more. The Calabi-Yau conjectures about surfaces date back to the 1960s. Much work has been done on them over the past four decades. In particular, examples of Jorge-Xavier from 1980 and Nadirashvili from 1996 showed that the immersed versions were false; we will show here that for embedded surfaces, i.e., injective immersions, they are in fact true.

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arXiv2006

Estimates for the extinction time for the Ricci flow on certain 3-manifolds and a question of Perelman

In this note we prove some bounds for the extinction time for the Ricci flow on certain 3-manifolds. Our interest in this comes from a question of Grisha Perelman asked to the first author at a dinner in New York City on April 25th of 2003. His question was ``what happens to the Ricci flow on the 3-sphere when one starts with an arbitrary metric? In particular does the flow become extinct in finite time?'' He then went on to say that one of the difficulties in answering this is that he knew of no good way of constructing minimal surfaces for such a metric in general. However, there is a natural way of constructing such surfaces and that comes from the min--max argument where the minimal of all maximal slices of sweep-outs is a minimal surface; see, for instance, [CD]. The idea is then to look at how the area of this min-max surface changes under the flow. Geometrically the area measures a kind of width of the 3-manifold and as we will see for certain 3-manifolds (those, like the 3-sphere, whose prime decomposition contains no aspherical factors) the area becomes zero in finite time corresponding to that the solution becomes extinct in finite time. Moreover, we will discuss a possible lower bound for how fast the area becomes zero. Very recently Perelman posted a paper (see [Pe1]) answering his original question about finite extinction time. However, even after the appearance of his paper, then we still think that our slightly different approach may be of interest. In part because it is in some ways geometrically more natural, in part because it also indicates that lower bounds should hold, and in part because it avoids using the curve shortening flow that he simultaneously with the Ricci flow needed to invoke and thus our approach is in some respects technically easier.

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arXiv2005

What are the shapes of embedded minimal surfaces and why?

Minimal surfaces with uniform curvature (or area) bounds have been well understood and the regularity theory is complete, yet essentially nothing was known without such bounds. We discuss here the theory of embedded (i.e., without self-intersections) minimal surfaces in Euclidean 3-space without a priori bounds. The study is divided into three cases, depending on the topology of the surface. Case one is where the surface is a disk, in case two the surface is a planar domain (genus zero), and the third case is that of finite (non-zero) genus. The complete understanding of the disk case is applied in both cases two and three. As we will see, the helicoid, which is a double spiral staircase, is the most important example of an embedded minimal disk. In fact, we will see that every such disk is either a graph of a function or part of a double spiral staircase. The helicoid was discovered to be a minimal surface by Meusnier in 1776. For planar domains the fundamental examples are the catenoid, also discovered by Meusnier in 1776, and the Riemann examples discovered by Riemann in the beginning of the 1860s. Finally, for general fixed genus an important example is the recent example by Hoffman-Weber-Wolf of a genus one helicoid. In the last section we discuss why embedded minimal surfaces are automatically proper. This was known as the Calabi-Yau conjectures for embedded surfaces. For immersed surfaces there are counter-examples by Jorge-Xavier and Nadirashvili.

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arXiv2005

Minimal submanifolds

In what follows we give a quick tour through the field of minimal submanifolds, starting at the definition and the classical results and ending up with current areas of research.

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arXiv2005

Minimal submanifolds: Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics

We give a quick tour through many of the classical results in the field of minimal submanifolds, starting at the definition. The field of minimal submanifolds remains extremely active and has very recently seen major developments that have solved many longstanding open problems and conjectures; for more on this, see the expanded version of this survey as well as recent surveys of Meeks and Perez, Perez, and Rosenberg.

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arXiv2003

Singularity structure in mean curvature flow of mean convex sets

In this note we announce results on the mean curvature flow of mean convex sets in 3-dimensions. Loosely speaking, our results justify the naive picture of mean curvature flow where the only singularities are neck pinches, and components which collapse to asymptotically round spheres.

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arXiv2003

The min--max construction of minimal surfaces

In this paper we survey with complete proofs some well--known, but hard to find, results about constructing closed embedded minimal surfaces in a closed 3-dimensional manifold via min--max arguments. This includes results of J. Pitts, F. Smith, and L. Simon and F. Smith.

math.AP↗
arXiv2003

An excursion into geometric analysis

This is a guided tour through some selected topics in geometric analysis. We have chosen to illustrate many of the basic ideas as they apply to the theory of minimal surfaces. This is, in part, because minimal surfaces is, if not the oldest, then certainly one of the oldest areas of geometric analysis dating back to Euler's work in the 1740's and in fact many of the basic ideas in geometric analysis originated in the study of minimal surfaces. In any case, the ideas apply to a variety of different fields and we will mention some of these as we go along.

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