Homotopy of area decreasing maps by mean curvature flow》.pdfVIP

Advances in Mathematics 255 (2014) 455–473 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Advances in Mathematics /locate/aim Homotopy of area decreasing maps by mean curvature flow Andreas Savas-Halilaj a,∗,1 , Knut Smoczyk b a Institut für Differentialgeometrie, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover, Germany b Institut für Differentialgeometrie and Riemann Center for Geometry and Physics, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover, Germany a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Let f : M → N be a smooth area decreasing map between Received 7 February 2013 two Riemannian manifolds (M, gM ) and (N, gN ). Under weak Accepted 21 January 2014 and natural assumptions on the curvatures of (M, gM ) and Available online 31 January 2014 (N, gN ), we prove that the mean curvature flow provides a Communicated by Gang Tian smooth homotopy of f to a constant map. MSC: © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 53C44 53C42 57R52 35K55 Keywords: Mean curvature flow Homotopy Area decreasing Graphs Maximum principle 1. Introduction Given a continuous map f : M → N between two smooth manifolds M and N , it is an interesting problem to find canonical representatives in the homotopy class of f . * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: savasha@math.uni-hannover.de (A. Savas-Halilaj), smoczyk@math.uni-hannover.de (K. Smoczyk). 1 The first author is supported by the grant of EΣΠA: