Minmax Hierarchies and Minimal Surfaces in Manifolds

Abstract: We introduce a general scheme that permits to generate successive min-max problems for producing critical points of higher and higher indices to Palais-Smale Functionals in Banach manifolds equipped with Finsler structures. We call the resulting tree of minmax problems a minmax hierarchy. Using the viscosity approach to the minmax theory of minimal surfaces introduced by the author in a series of recent works, we explain how this scheme can be deformed for producing smooth minimal surfaces of strictly increasing area in arbitrary codimension. We implement this scheme to the case of the $3-$dimensional sphere. In particular we are giving a min-max characterization of the Clifford Torus and conjecture what are the next minimal surfaces to come in the $S^3$ hierarchy. Among other results we prove here the lower semi continuity of the Morse Index in the viscosity method below an area level.