Mean curvature flow with free boundary in embedded cylinders or cones and uniqueness results for minimal hypersurfaces (Q1678559)

The author studies short- and long-time existence of the mean curvature flow with free boundary for disks immersed on generalized cones and cylinders. A loss of domain can occur and could be called type-0 singularity, but it is not a singularity in the classical sense. Singularities can occur in finite time, called curvature singularities, or solutions exist for infinite time and converge to a flat disk. The singularities are studied and classified in the paper. Moreover, the latter singularities led the author to extend results on minimal hypersurfaces on generalized cones and cylinders revealing it as one of the author's motivations for studying the flow. The advantage of this method for the theory of minimal hypersurfaces is, among others, that these results do not require assumptions of symmetry or on the topology.