\(\alpha \)-Gauss curvature flows with flat sides (Q1932429)

The authors study the deformation of the 2-dimensional convex surfaces in \(\mathbb R^{3}\) whose speed at a point on the surface is proportional to the \(\alpha \)-power of the positive part of Gauss curvature. Such kind of equations describe several interesting phenomena such as rolling stones on hyperplanes, affine normal flows, gradient flows of the mean width in \(L^p\) norm and image process. For \(\frac {1}{2}<\alpha \leq 1\), the authors show that there is a smooth solution if the initial data is smooth and strictly convex, and that there is a viscosity solution with \(C^{1,1}\)-estimate before the collapsing time if the initial surface is only convex. Moreover, the authors shows that also in this context (as for \(p\)-Laplacian and porous medium equations) there is a waiting time effect, i.e. the flat spot of the convex surface will persist for a while. Lastly the authors show the interface between the flat side and the strictly convex side of the surface remains smooth on \(0<t<T_{0}\) under certain necessary regularity and non-degeneracy initial conditions, where \(T_{0}\) is the vanishing time of the flat side.