Linking anisotropic sharp and diffuse surface motion laws via gradient flows (Q1906405)

The authors consider four laws of motion for sharp surfaces (e.g., motion by mean curvature or by the negative Laplacian of the mean curvature) and show that they can all be interpreted as gradient flows of the same energy functional corresponding to different choices of inner product. Anisotropic as well as isotropic energies are considered. They also obtain analogous results for the diffuse interface counterparts of these equations (e.g., Allen-Cahn and Cahn-Hilliard equations). For both classes of examples the anisotropy of the kinetics is incorporated into the inner product, not into the energy functional.