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We study immersed prescribed mean curvature compact hypersurfaces with boundary in Hn+1(-1). When the boundary is a convex planar smooth manifold with all principal curvatures greater than 1, we solve a nonparametric Dirichlet problem and use this, together with a general flux formula, to prove a parametric uniqueness result, in the class of all immersed compact hypersurfaces with the same boundary. We specialize this result to a constant mean curvature, obtaining a characterization of totally umbilic hypersurface caps.

Hypersurfaces \(M^n\)with constant mean curvature in a Riemannian manifold \(\overline{M}^{n+1}\)display many similarities with minimal hypersurfaces of \(\overline{M}^{n+1}\). They are both solutions to the variational problem of minimizing the area function for certain variations. In the first case, however, the admissible variations are only those that leave a certain volume function fixed (for precise definitions, see Sect. 2). This isoperimetric character of the variational problem associated to hypersurfaces of constant mean curvature introduces additional complications in the treatment of stability of such hypersurfaces.

We obtain a priori bounds for solutions of the nonlinear second-order elliptic equation of the geometric problem consisting in finding a compact starshaped hypersurface in a space form whose mth elementary symmetric function of principal curvatures is a given function.