Colliding interfaces in old and new diffuse-interface approximations of Willmore-flow (Q2017235)

This important paper is concerned with diffuse-interface approximations of the Willmore flow. One advantage of the diffuse-interface approach is that usually an automatic treatment of topological changes in a reasonable manner is guaranteed. It is however not always clear which (generalized) sharp-interface evolution is in fact approximated. The authors here present this issue in the case of the diffuse flow, in particular in situations where collisions between different interfaces occur and where these interfaces interact with each other. In applications such as image processing and computer vision, it is of great interest to compute the Willmore flow through such topological events. Main result: Numerical simulations with Bellettini's approximation are proposed. The authors provide numerical experiments in the plane with Bellettini's Gamma-convergent approximation, and investigate what happens at topological changes. In the interest of isolating potential numerical artifacts from inherent behavior of the Willmore flow that results from this approximation, the authors keep the numerical scheme as simple as possible: it is a straight-forward finite differences discretization, with explicit time stepping. Unsurprisingly, computations with this scheme are very slow, owing to the extremely stringent stability restriction on the time step size. However, they appear to be also very robust. In particular, a discrete form of the energy is observed to decrease at every time step. Due to the delicate nature of the question (topological changes in a fourth order gradient flow for a curvature dependent functional), the authors give full details of the implementation. For the standard diffuse approximation this work demonstrates that (at least in two dimensions) transversal intersections of diffuse interfaces are preferred.