Complete harmonic stable minimal hypersurfaces in a Riemannian manifold

In this paper, we will introduce the notion of harmonic stability for complete minimal hypersurfaces in a complete Riemannian manifold. The first result we prove, is that a complete harmonic stable minimal surface in a Riemannian manifold with non-negative Ricci curvature is conformally equivalent to either a plane R ² or a cylinder R × S ¹, which generalizes a theorem due to Fischer-Colbrie and Schoen 12]. The second one is that an n ≥ 2-dimensional, complete harmonic stable minimal, hypersurface M in a complete Riemannian manifold with non-negative sectional curvature has only one end if M is non-parabolic. The third one, which we prove, is that there exist no non-trivial L ²-harmonic one forms on a complete harmonic stable minimal hypersurface in a complete Riemannian manifold with non-negative sectional curvature. Since the harmonic stability is weaker than stability, we obtain a generalization of a theorem due to Miyaoka 20] and Palmer 21]. Research partially Supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. The author’s research was supported by grant Proj. No. KRF-2007-313-C00058 from Korea Research Foundation, Korea. Authors’ addresses: Qing-Ming Cheng, Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Saga University, Saga 840-8502, Japan; Young Jin Suh, Department of Mathematics, Kyungpook National University, Taegu 702-701, South Korea