Boundary singularities in mean curvature flow and total curvature of minimal surface boundaries (Q2693158)

Summary: For hypersurfaces moving by standard mean curvature flow with fixed boundary, we show that if a tangent flow at a boundary singularity is given by a smoothly embedded shrinker, then the shrinker must be non-orientable. We also show that there is an initially smooth surface in \(\mathbf{R}^3\) that develops a boundary singularity for which the shrinker is smoothly embedded (and therefore non-orientable). Indeed, we show that there is a non-empty open set of such initial surfaces. Let \(\kappa\) be the largest number with the following property: if \(M\) is a minimal surface in \(\mathbf{R}^3\) bounded by a smooth simple closed curve of total curvature \(< \kappa\), then \(M\) is a disk. Examples show that \(\kappa < 4 \pi\). In this paper, we use mean curvature flow to show that \(\kappa \geq 3\pi\). We get a slightly larger lower bound for orientable surfaces.