ON STABLE MINIMAL SURFACES IN THREE DIMENSIONAL MANIFOLDS OF NONNEGATIVE SCALAR CURVATURE

ON STABLE MINIMAL SURFACES IN THREE DIMENSIONAL MANIFOLDS OF NONNEGATIVE SCALAR CURVATURE

The following is the basic problem about the stability in Riemannian Geometry; given a Riemannian manifold N, find all stable complete minimal submanifolds of N. As answers of this problem, do Carmo-Peng [1] and Fischer-Colbrie and Schoen [3] showed that the stable minimal surfaces in R$^{3}$ are planes and Schoen-Yau [5] and Fischer-Colbrie and Schoen [3] gave a solution for the case where the ambient space is a three dimensional manifold with nonnegative scalar curvature. In this paper we will remove the assumption of finite absolute total curvature in [3, Theorem 3].