Motion of elastic wire with thickness (Q601289)

The authors consider a thick wire, and define the kinetic energy of motion of the wire appropriately, and derive the equation of the wire from the total energy functional. Their main concern is to extend previous result for the higher dimensional case, more precisely, to generalize the global existence results to an arbitrary space dimension. In this approach, they use covariant differentiation on the unit sphere. Under appropriate conditions, the authors prove the existence of unique smooth short-time solutions or, prove the existence of unique solutions defined for any positive time, depending on whether a given compatibility condition is satisfied or not.