The surface diffusion and the Willmore flow for uniformly regular hypersurfaces

Abstract

We consider the surface diffusion and Willmore flows acting on a general class of (possibly non-compact) hypersurfaces parameterized over a uniformly regular reference manifold possessing a tubular neighborhood with uniform radius. The surface diffusion and Willmore flows each give rise to a fourth-order quasilinear parabolic equation with nonlinear terms satisfying a specific singular structure. We establish well-posedness of both flows for initial surfaces that are $C^{1+\alpha }$-regular and parameterized over a uniformly regular hypersurface. For the Willmore flow, we also show long-term existence for initial surfaces which are $C^{1+\alpha }$-close to a sphere, and we prove that these solutions become spherical as time goes to infinity.

22 pages