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Some new functionals related to free boundary minimal submanifolds
The metrics induced on free boundary minimal surfaces in geodesic
balls in the upper unit hemisphere and hyperbolic space can be characterized as crit-
ical metrics for the functionals Θr,i and Ωr,i, introduced recently by Lima, Menezes
and the second author. In this paper, we generalize this characterization to free
boundary minimal submanifolds of higher dimension in the same spaces. We also
introduce some functionals of the form different from Θr,i, and show that the critical
metrics for them are the metrics induced by free boundary minimal immersions into
a geodesic ball in the upper unit hemisphere. In the case of surfaces, these function-
als are bounded from above and not bounded from below. Moreover, the canonical
metric on a geodesic disk in a 3-ball in the upper unit hemisphere is maximal for
this functional on the set of all Riemannian metric of the topological disk.