ON STABLE MINIMAL SURFACES IN THREE DIMENSIONAL MANIFOLDS OF NONNEGATIVE SCALAR CURVATURE

The following is the basic problem about the stability in Riemannian Geometry; given a Riemannian manifold N, find all stable complete minimal submanifolds of N. As answers of this problem, do Carmo-Peng [1] and Fischer-Colbrie and Schoen [3] showed that the stable minimal surfaces in R$^{3}$ are planes and Schoen-Yau [5] and Fischer-Colbrie and Schoen [3] gave a solution for the case where the ambient space is a three dimensional manifold with nonnegative scalar curvature. In this paper we will remove the assumption of finite absolute total curvature in [3, Theorem 3].