The anisotropic min-max theory: Existence of anisotropic minimal and CMC surfaces

Abstract

We prove the existence of nontrivial closed surfaces with constant anisotropic mean curvature with respect to elliptic integrands in closed smooth 3–dimensional Riemannian manifolds. The constructed min-max surfaces are smooth with at most one singular point. The constant anisotropic mean curvature can be fixed to be any real number. In particular, we partially solve a conjecture of Allard in dimension 3.