Well-posedness for the heat flow of biharmonic maps with rough initial data (Q692171)

The author studies the heat flow of biharmonic maps from Euclidean space to a compact Riemannian manifold without boundary. This is a fourth order flow, and the main goal of the article is to establish a well-posedness result for this flow with rough initial data. The short time solution and certain global behavior with more regular initial data has been studied by various authors. The main result in the article is to prove that for heat flow of the biharmonic map and the intrinsic biharmonic map with small rough initial data in BMO space, there exists a unique solution with improved regularity for a short time. The main idea is based on the properties of the (linear) biharmonic heat equation and a fixed point argument; while the actual argument relies on careful and detailed estimates surrounding the biharmonic heat equations.