Regularity and uniqueness of a class of biharmonic map heat flows (Q2510348)

The authors consider the heat flow on a bounded smooth domain \(\Omega\) or on \(\Omega = \mathbb{R}^n\) of biharmonic maps to the unit sphere \(\mathbb{S}^L\) governed by the initial boundary value problem \[ \partial u_t + \Delta^2 u = \mathcal{N}_{\mathrm{bh}}[u] \qquad \text{in } \Omega \times (0,T) \] \[ u = u_0 \qquad \text{on } \partial_p(\Omega \times [0,T]) \] \[ \frac{\partial u}{\partial \nu} = \frac{\partial u_0}{\partial \nu} \qquad \text{on } \partial \Omega \times [0,T), \] where \(\nu\) denotes the outward unit normal of \(\partial \Omega\), \(\partial_p\) is the parabolic boundary of \(\Omega \times [0,T]\) and \(\mathcal{N}_{\mathrm{bh}}\) the non-linearity \[ \mathcal{N}_{\mathrm{bu}}[u] = \Delta(A(u) (\nabla u, \nabla u)) + 2 \nabla \cdot \langle \Delta u, \nabla(P(u)) \rangle - \langle \Delta (P(u)), \Delta u \rangle. \] Here \(P(y) : \mathbb{R}^{L+1} \to T_y \mathbb{S}^L\) is the orthogonal projection for \(y \in \mathbb{S}^L\) and \(A(y)(\cdot, \cdot) = \nabla P(y)(\cdot, \cdot)\) the second fundamental form of \(\mathbb{S}^L\) at \(y \in \mathbb{S}^L\). They show that for a weak solution of the above equation that has small renormalized total energy locally at each interior point the solution is unique and smooth in the interior of \(\Omega\). Moreover, the convexity of the Hessian energy and the existence of a unique limit at \(t = \infty\) is shown.