Partial regularity for weak heat flows into a general compact Riemannian manifold (Q1417397)

The subject of this paper is the harmonic map heat flow with values in a general compact Riemannian manifold. A stationary solution is a weak solution to the heat flow which is in some sense stable with respect to variations in the (time and space variables of the) domain; this notion has been introduced by \textit{M. Feldman} [Commun. Partial Differ. Equations 19, 761--790 (1994; Zbl 0807.35021)]. Stationary solutions are known to satisfy some parabolic monotonicity inequality, which is one of the key ingredients in the current regularity proof. It is proved that stationary harmonic map heat flows are smooth outside a closed singular set of \(n\)-dimensional parabolic Hausdorff measure \(0\), where \(n\) is the dimension of the domain manifold. Besides the monotonicity formula, other tools used in the proof are Hodge decomposition and parabolic Hardy spaces, as well as Hardy-BMO duality and Hélein's technique of adapted moving frames. Boundary regularity has been treated by the same author: \textit{Xiangao Liu} [Chin. Ann. Math., Ser. B 23, 119--136 (2002; Zbl 1003.58013)].