Mean curvature flow and self-similar submanifolds
We summarize here the main ideas and results of our papers [28], [14], as presented at the 2013 CIRM Meeting on Discrete curvature and we augment these by bringing up an application of one of our main results, namely to solving a problem regarding cube complexes.
We prove existence of minimizing movements for the dislocation dynamics evolution law of a propagating front, in which the normal velocity of the front is the sum of a non-local term and a mean curvature term. We prove that any such minimizing movement is a weak solution of this evolution law, in a sense related to viscosity solutions of the corresponding level-set equation. We also prove the consistency of this approach, by showing that any minimizing movement coincides with the smooth evolution...
We consider the motion by curvature of a network of smooth curves with multiple junctions in the plane, that is, the geometric gradient flow associated to the length functional. Such a flow represents the evolution of a two–dimensional multiphase system where the energy is simply the sum of the lengths of the interfaces, in particular it is a possible model for the growth of grain boundaries. Moreover, the motion of these networks of curves is the simplest example of curvature flow for sets which...