Global solutions to the heat flow for \(m\)-harmonic maps and regularity (Q2874075)

This interesting paper is concerned with the heat flow for \(m\)-harmonic maps from a compact \(m\)-dimensional Riemannian manifold with boundary into a compact Riemannian manifold. The \(m\)-harmonic map heat flow is the gradient flow of \(\int|Du|^m\,dx\); more generally, the authors study the heat flow for \(\int(s^2+|Du|^2)^{m/2}\,dx\) for any \(s\in[0,1]\). Cauchy-Dirichlet data are prescribed on the parabolic boundary, which is one of the essential new features here. The authors establish the existence of global weak solutions in \(C^0([0,\infty);L^2)\cap L^\infty(0,\infty;W^{1,m})\). There is a sequence of times \(t_j\to\infty\) for which the time slices of \(u\) converge to a solution of the stationary problem. Moreover, for the case of the target having non-positive sectional curvature, a solution is constructed which is \(C^{1,\alpha}\) in the space variables.NEWLINENEWLINEThe weak solution is constructed by a time discretization argument inspired by \textit{J.-i. Haga} et al. [Comput. Vis. Sci. 7, No. 1, 53--59 (2004; Zbl 1120.53304)]. On equidistant time slices of step size \(h\), an approximative solution is constructed successively by letting \(u^{(j)}\) be the minimizer of the functional \(F^{(j)}(v):={1\over m}\int(s^2+|Dv|^2)^{m/2}\,dx+{1\over2h}\int|v-u^{(j-1)}|^2\,dx.\) Even in the degenerate case \(s=0\), the procedure is applied with some nonvanishing \(s_\ell\), letting \(s_\ell\searrow0\) only after \(h\searrow 0\) has been performed. A striking technical feature is the use of estimates in some fractional Sobolev space, which helps to achieve strong convergence of the approximating sequence as \(h\searrow 0\) away from finitely many points.