The evolution of complete non-compact graphs by powers of Gauss curvature (Q2009894)

The authors study the evolution of complete non-compact hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ by powers of the Gauss curvature. Precisely, the evolution of the embedding $F(\cdot,t):M^n\to \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ satisfies \[ \frac{\partial}{\partial t}F(p,t)=K^\alpha(p,t)\vec{n}(p,t) \tag{1} \] with $F(p,t)$ approaching the given initial embedding $F_0$ as $t\to 0$, where $\alpha>0$ is a real number, $K$ denotes the Gauss curvature of the evolving hypersurface $\Sigma_t=F(M^n,t)$ and $\vec{n}$ denotes its unit inward normal vector field. The evolution equation (1) for compact hypersurfaces has been widely studied in previous literatures. The main purpose of this paper is to establish the long-time existence of equation (1) starting from an initial complete, non-compact and locally uniformly convex hypersurface in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$. This generalizes the earlier results on mean curvature flow of complete non-compact graphs in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ obtained by \textit{K. Ecker} and \textit{G. Huisken} [Ann. Math. (2) 130, No. 3, 453--471 (1989; Zbl 0696.53036); Invent. Math. 105, No. 3, 547--569 (1991; Zbl 0707.53008)] and \textit{M. Sáez} and \textit{O. C. Schnürer} [J. Differ. Geom. 97, No. 3, 545--570 (2014; Zbl 1295.53078)] to the fully nonlinear setting. The proof of the main result relies mainly on two a priori estimates: one is the local lower bound on the smallest principal curvature $\lambda_{\min}$ of $\Sigma_t$, which is given in Section 3; the second one is the local upper bound on the speed function $K^\alpha$ of $\Sigma_t$, which is given in Section 4. During the analysis, the authors have carefully overcome the difficulties caused by the fact that equation (1) is fully nonlinear and the speed $K^\alpha$ is not homogeneous of degree one. The proof of the main theorem is completed in the last section. Note that the asymptotical behavior of the evolution (1) has also been studied recently by the first two authors and \textit{B. Choi} (see [``Convergence of flows by powers of Gauss curvature to translating soliton'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1901.01080}]).