The gradient flow of O'Hara's knot energies (Q1709762)

In his paper [in: Topology - Hawaii. Proceedings of a conference, held at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA, August 12-18, 1990. Singapore: World Scientific. 201--214 (1992; Zbl 1039.58500)], \textit{J. O'Hara} introduced a family of knot energies and studied its basic properties. The author studies the negative gradient flow of the sum of certain O'Hara energies and positive multiples of the lengths. As it is shown in the paper the gradients of these knot energies can be written as the normal part of a quasilinear operator. This results in short-time existence results for these flows. Further, the author proves the long-time existence and the convergence to critical points.