On the essential spectrum of Nadirashvili-Martin-Morales minimal surfaces

We show that the spectrum of a complete submanifold properly immersed into a ball of a Riemannian manifold is discrete, provided the norm of the mean curvature vector is sufficiently small. In particular, the spectrum of a complete minimal surface properly immersed into a ball of ${\mathbb{R}}^3$ is discrete. This gives a positive answer to a question of Yau.