Harmonic and quasi-harmonic spheres. III: Rectifiability of the parabolic defect measure and generalized varifold flows (Q1611394)

This is the third part of the authors' project on the study of the weakly convergent sequence of smooth (or certain classes of weak) solutions to the heat equation of harmonic maps or approximated harmonic maps (i.e., the negative gradient flow of the generalized Ginzburg-Landau functionals). The first part of the project has been published in Commun. Anal. Geom. 7, 397--429 (1999; Zbl 0934.58018), the second part in ibid. 10, No. 2, 341--375 (2002; Zbl 1042.58005). In this part, the authors prove a dimensional stratification for the space-time concentration measure and verify that the concentration measure, viewed as a generalized varifold, moves according to the generalized varifold flow rule which reduces to the Brakke's flow of varifold provided that the limiting harmonic map flow is suitable. To establish that the flow is actually the Brakke's flow is one of the most difficult analytical points in all such related analysis. One method used by authors is to establish the local almost conformal property of the solution map restricted to the 2-dimensional plane orthogonal to the tangent plane of the energy concentration set. Moreover, the authors also establish the energy quantization result in dimension larger than two, which extends the main result of the second part of the project. This is a nice work on weakly convergent sequences of suitable weak solutions of heat flows of harmonic maps or approximated harmonic maps.