Abstract:
The fact that locally area minimizing hypersurfaces sitting inside smooth Riemannian manifolds have vanishing mean curvature is a cornerstone of Geometric Measure Theory and of its several applications in Geometric Analysis. In this talk I will discuss how this principle can be extended and exploited on non smooth spaces with lower Ricci Curvature bounds, where the first variation formula is not available and the classical regularity theory does not even make sense.