Willmore flow of complete surfaces (Q6146580)

For an immersed surface \(f:\Sigma ^{2}\looparrowright \mathbb{R}^{n}\), the Willmore energy is defined as \[\mathcal{W}(f)=\frac{1}{2}\int_{\Sigma }\left\vert A\right\vert ^{2}d\mu =\frac{1}{2}\int_{\Sigma }\left\vert A^{0}\right\vert ^{2}d\mu +2\pi \chi (\Sigma )=\frac{1}{2}\int_{\Sigma }\left\vert H\right\vert ^{2}d\mu -2\pi \chi (\Sigma ),\] where \(A\) denotes the second fundamental form of \(\Sigma \), \(A^{0}\) the trace-free part of \(A\), and \(H\) the mean curvature. The first variation of \(\mathcal{W}\) is given by the Willmore tensor \(W(f)=\Delta H+Q(A^{0})H\), where \(Q\) is defined by \( Q(\eta )\phi =g^{ik}g^{j\ell }\eta _{ij}\left\langle \eta _{k\ell },\phi \right\rangle _{N_{\Sigma }}\), for tensors \(\eta \in \Gamma (N_{\Sigma }\otimes \mathrm{Sym}^{2}(T^{\ast }\Sigma ))\) and \(\phi \in \Gamma (N_{\Sigma })\). The author considers the Willmore flow equation: \(\partial _{t}f=-W(f)\), with the initial condition \(f\mid _{t=0}=f_{0}:\Sigma \looparrowright \mathbb{R} ^{n}\). The main result is that if \(f_{0}\) is a smooth, complete, properly immersed surface in \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\), then there exist \(\varepsilon _{1}>0\) and \(c_{1}>0\), both depending only on \(n\), such that, whenever the initial energy concentration condition \[\int_{\Sigma _{0}\cap B\varrho (x)}\left\vert A^{0}\right\vert ^{2}d\mu _{0}\leq e_{0}\leq \varepsilon _{1}, \qquad \forall x\in \mathbb{R}^{n}\] holds for some \( \varrho ,e_{0}>0\), there exists a solution \(f:\Sigma \times \lbrack 0,T)\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{n}\) to the above Willmore flow equation such that \(T\geq c_{1}^{-1}\varrho ^{4}\). Moreover, \(f\) satisfies an estimate for the growth of energy concentration: \[\int_{\Sigma _{t}\cap B\varrho (x)}\left\vert A_{t}\right\vert ^{2}d\mu _{t}\leq a_{n}e_{0}(1+c_{1}\varrho ^{-4}t), \qquad \forall x\in \mathbb{R}^{n}, 0\leq t\leq c_{1}^{-1}\varrho ^{4}.\] For the proof, the author introduces the weighted problem \(\partial _{t}f=-\theta ^{r}W(f)\), with the initial condition \(f\mid _{t=0}=f_{0}\), where \(0\leq \theta \leq 1\) is a smooth function defined on the ambient space, that is \(\theta =\widehat{\theta }\circ f\), for some \(\widehat{\theta }:\mathbb{R}^{n}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) and \(r\) a sufficiently large integer. He proves estimates in weighted spaces in the present context. He analyzes the evolution of tensors and he gives estimates concerning the evolution of \(L^{2}\)-norms of tensors along the Willmore flow, from which he derives the short-time existence result for the Willmore flow. He also proves an uniqueness result arguing by contradiction and computing estimates for the difference between two solutions. In the final part of their paper, the author proves that the total energy \(\mathcal{W}(f_{0})\) of a complete, smooth, and properly immersed Willmore surface is less than \(\varepsilon _{0}/2\), \(\Sigma _{0}\) is a plane and under the same smallness hypothesis on the initial surface but further assuming that \(\liminf_{R\rightarrow \infty }R^{-2}\mu _{0}(B_{R}(0))<\infty \), as \(t\rightarrow \infty \), any subsequence has a further subsequence such that the solution \(\Sigma \) to the Willmore flow converges to a plane in an appropriate sense.