Bifurcations and the Plateau problem in Riemannian manifolds (Q1896732)

The classical Plateau problem consists of finding a two-dimensional minimal surface with prescribed boundary curve. This problem was generalised to higher dimensions and also to Riemannian manifolds in the past. Special attention was given to index theory and to bifurcation phenomena for such problems. The article contains the announcement of a result on the index of the perturbed Plateau operator based on the functional operator method developed by the author in his previous publications.