Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

We shall present a procedure which to any admissible family of immersions of surfaces into an arbitrary closed riemannian manifolds assigns a smooth, possibly branched, minimal surface whose area is equal to the width of the corresponding minmax and whose Morse index is bounded by the dimension of the familly. We will discuss the question of bounding the Morse index + Nullity from below as well as possible extensions of this procedure to more general families.