Gradient estimates and existence of mean curvature flow with transport term. (Q2444523)

In this paper the author considers a hypersurface, which is expressed by a graph, moving by the mean curvature flow with a transport term. The proof of the gradient estimates and the short-time existence for the mean curvature flow with a transport term is given by applying the backward heat kernel. In more detail, the author considers the family of hypersurfaces \(\{\Gamma (t)\}_{0 \leqslant t \leqslant \infty }\) in \(\mathbb {R}^n\) with the unit normal vector field \(\nu \) and the mean curvature \(H\). The velocity of the family is \(V_\Gamma = (F \cdot \nu ) \nu + H \nu \) on \(\Gamma (t)\), \(t \geqslant 0\). The function \(F\) is given and \((F \cdot \nu ) \nu \) is the transport term. It should be noted that for compact hypersurfaces, if \(F\) is its radius vector, such a mean curvature flow was studied in the article [\textit{A. A. Borisenko} and \textit{V. Miquel}, J. Evol. Equ. 10, No. 2, 413--423 (2010; Zbl 1239.53083)]. Further, it is assumed that \((\nu \cdot (0,\ldots ,1)) > 0\) on \(\Gamma (t)\) for \(t \geqslant 0\). From this assumption there exists \(u = u(x,t)\) such that \(\Gamma (t) = \{(x, u(x,t))\: x \in \mathbb {R}^n\}\) for \(t \geqslant 0\). The author gives a new, simple proof of the gradient estimate of \(u\) to prove the short-time existence of the graph \(\Gamma (t)\) for any dimension using a derivation of the monotonicity formula which was introduced by G. Huisken.