On the free boundary min-max geodesics

Given a Riemannian manifold and a closed submanifold, we find a geodesic segment with free boundary on the given submanifold. This is a corollary of the min-max theory which we develop in this article for the free boundary variational problem. In particular, we develop a modified Birkhoff curve shortening process to achieve a strong “Colding-Minicozzi” type min-max approximation result.