Motion by volume preserving mean curvature flow near cylinders

We investigate the volume preserving mean curvature flow with Neumann boundary condition for hypersurfaces that are graphs over a cylinder. Through a center manifold analysis we find that initial hypersurfaces sufficiently close to a cylinder of large enough radius, have a flow that exists for all time and converges exponentially fast to a cylinder. In particular, we show that there exist global solutions to the flow that converge to a cylinder, which are initially non-axially symmetric. A similar case where the initial hypersurfaces are spherical graphs has previously been investigated by Escher and Simonett [8].

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Published 27 December 2013