Existence and properties of certain critical points of the Cahn-Hilliard energy

The Cahn-Hilliard energy landscape on the torus is explored in the critical regime of large system size and mean value close to $-1$. Existence and properties of a droplet-shaped local energy minimizer are established. A standard mountain pass argument leads to the existence of a saddle point whose energy is equal to the energy barrier, for which a quantitative bound is deduced. In addition, finer properties of the local minimizer and appropriately defined constrained minimizers are deduced. The proofs employ the $Gamma$-limit (identified in a previous work), quantitative isoperimetric inequalities, variational arguments, and Steiner symmetrization.