In this paper, we establish a min-max theory for constructing minimal disks with free boundary in any closed Riemannian manifold. The main result is an effective version of the partial Morse theory for minimal disks with free boundary established by Fraser. Our theory also includes as a special case the min-max theory for Plateau problem of minimal disks, which can be used to generalize the famous work by Morse-Thompkins and Shiffman on minimal surfaces in R n to the Riemannian setting.More precisely, we generalize the min-max construction of minimal surfaces using harmonic replacement introduced by Colding and Minicozzi to the free boundary setting. As a key ingredient to this construction, we show an energy convexity for weakly harmonic maps with mixed Dirichlet and free boundaries from the half unit 2-disk in R 2 into any closed Riemannian manifold, which in particular yields the uniqueness of such weakly harmonic maps. This is a free boundary analogue of the energy convexity and uniqueness for weakly harmonic maps with Dirichlet boundary on the unit 2-disk proved by Colding and Minicozzi.

This is a contribution to the program of dynamical approach to mean curvature flow initiated by Colding and Minicozzi. In this paper, we prove two main theorems. The first one is local in nature and the second one is global. In this first result, we pursue the stream of ideas of [CM3] and get a slight refinement of their results. We apply the invariant manifold theory from hyperbolic dynamics to study the dynamics close to a closed shrinker that is not a sphere. In the second theorem, we show that if a hypersurface under the rescaled mean curvature flow converges to a closed shrinker that is not a sphere, then a generic perturbation on initial data would make the flow leave a small neighborhood of the shrinker and never come back.

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We prove the multiplicity one theorem for min-max free boundary minimal hypersurfaces in compact manifolds with boundary of dimension between 3 and 7 for generic metrics. To approach this, we develop existence and regularity theory for free boundary hypersurface with prescribed mean curvature, which includes the regularity theory for minimizers, compactness theory, and a generic min-max theory with Morse index bounds. As applications, we construct new free boundary minimal hypersurfaces in the unit balls in Euclidean spaces and self-shrinkers of the mean curvature flows with arbitrarily large entropy.1 Here a metric is said to be bumpy if each closed immersed minimal hypersurfaces has no Jacobi field, and the set of bumpy metrics in a closed manifold is generic in the Baire sense by White [56,57].

In this paper we prove that the generic singularity of mean curvature flow of closed embedded surfaces in R 3 modelled by closed self-shrinkers with multiplicity has multiplicity one. Together with the previous result by Colding-Minicozzi in [CM12], we conclude that the only generic singularity of mean curvature flow of closed embedded surfaces in R 3 modelled by closed self-shrinkers is a multiplicity one sphere. We also construct particular perturbation of the flow to avoid those singularities with multiplicity higher than one. Our result partially addresses the well-known multiplicity one conjecture by Ilmanen.