Shadows of graphical mean curvature flow

Abstract

We consider mean curvature flow of an initial surface that is the graph of a function over some domain of definition in $R^n$. If the graph is not complete then we impose a constant Dirichlet boundary condition at the boundary of the surface. We establish longtime-existence of the flow and investigate the projection of the flowing surface onto $R^n$, the shadow of the flow. This moving shadow can be seen as a weak solution for mean curvature flow of hypersurfaces in $R^n$ with a Dirichlet boundary condition. Furthermore, we provide a lemma of independent interest to locally mollify the boundary of an intersection of two smooth open sets in a way that respects curvature conditions.

12 pages, 1 figure