Barrier methods for minimal submanifolds in the Gibbons-Hawking ansatz

Abstract: We describe a barrier argument for compact minimal submanifolds in the multi-Eguchi-Hanson and in the multi-Taub-NUT spaces, which are hyperkaehler 4-manifolds given by the Gibbons-Hawking ansatz. This approach is used to obtain results towards a classification of compact minimal submanifolds in this setting. We also prove a converse of Tsai and Wang's result that relates the strong stability condition to the convexity of the distance function.