Mean curvature flow with bounded Gauss image (Q545504)

The author studies the mean curvature flow of a space-like submanifold \(M^{m}\) with codimension \(n\) in a pseudo-Riemannian manifold \(\mathbb{R}^{m+n}_{n}\), where \(\mathbb{R}^{m+n}_{n}\) denotes the Euclidean space \(\mathbb{R}^{m+n}\) together with the bilinear form given by \(\langle x,y \rangle = \sum_{i=1}^{m} x_{i} y_{i} - \sum_{\alpha=m+1}^{m+n} x_{\alpha} y_{\alpha}\). Let \(G^{n}_{m,n}\) denote the collection of all space-like \(m\)-dimensional subspaces of \(\mathbb{R}^{m+n}\). The group \(G = SO(m,n)\) acts transitively on \(G^{n}_{m,n}\) and the stability group of the space-like m-plane \(P = \mathrm{span}\{e_{1}, \dots , e_{m}\}\) is the maximal compact subgroup \(K = SO(m) \times SO(n)\). The space \(G^{n}_{m,n} = G/K\) is therefore a complete, simply connected Riemannian symmetric space of nonpositive sectional curvature. In particular there is a unique geodesic joining any two points of \(G^{n}_{m,n}\) and metric balls in \(G^{n}_{m,n}\) are convex. The Gauss map \(\gamma : M^{m} \rightarrow G^{n}_{m,n}\) assigns to each point \(m\) of \(M^{m}\) the parallel translate of \(T_{m}M\) to the origin of \(\mathbb{R}^{m+n}_{n}\). Let \(\{M_{t} \}\) denote the evolution of \(M\) by the mean curvature flow. The manifolds \(\{M_{t}\}\) remain space-like for all t for which the flow is defined. If \(\gamma(t)\) denotes the Gauss map of \(M_{t}\), then \(\gamma(t)\) satisfies the equation \(\frac{d\gamma}{dt} = \tau(\gamma(t))\), where \(\tau(\gamma(t))\) denotes the tension field of \(\gamma(t)\). The main result is the following Theorem~6.1. Let \(F : M^{m} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{m+n}\) be a complete, \(m\)-dimensional space-like submanifold with bounded Gauss image in \(G^{n}_{m,n}\) and bounded curvature. The mean curvature and its covariant derivatives are uniformly bounded. Then the mean curvature flow equations have a long time solution. A key step in the proof is to show that if the curvature of \(M^{m}\) is uniformly bounded, then for short time the Gauss images of the submanifolds \(\{M_{t} \}\) remain in any bounded metric ball of \(G^{n}_{m,n}\) that contains the Gauss image of \(M^{m} = M_{0}\). This step follows by applying a maximum principle that results from the bounded curvature hypothesis. The hypothesis that the Gauss image of \(M^{m}\) lies in a bounded metric ball implies that the mean curvature equations are uniformly parabolic.