Mean curvature flow of entire graphs evolving away from the heat flow

Abstract:

We present two initial graphs over the entire $\mathbb {R}^n$, $n \geq 2$ for which the mean curvature flow behaves differently from the heat flow. In the first example, the two flows stabilize at different heights. With our second example, the mean curvature flow oscillates indefinitely while the heat flow stabilizes. These results highlight the difference between dimensions $n \geq 2$ and dimension $n=1$, where Nara–Taniguchi proved that entire graphs in $C^{2,\alpha }(\mathbb {R})$ evolving under curve shortening flow converge to solutions to the heat equation with the same initial data.