Transience and capacity of minimal submanifolds

Abstract

We prove explicit lower bounds for the capacity of annular domains of minimal submanifolds P m in ambient Riemannian spaces N n with sectional curvatures bounded from above. We characterize the situations in which the lower bounds for the capacity are actually attained. Furthermore we apply these bounds to prove that Brownian motion defined on a complete minimal submanifold is transient when the ambient space is a negatively curved Hadamard-Cartan manifold. The proof stems directly from the capacity bounds and also covers the case of minimal submanifolds of dimension m > 2 in Euclidean spaces.