Alix Deruelle (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6) will speak in the geometry seminar on the 12th December. The talk will take place in the Salle de Profs (9th floor, NO) at 13.30pm. Alix’s title is “Expanders of the harmonic map flow” and the abstract is below.
Expanding self-similarities of a given evolution equation create an ambiguity in the continuation of the flow after it reached a first singularity. In this talk, we investigate the possibility of smoothing out any map from the n-sphere, n>1, to any closed Riemannian manifold, that is homotopic to a constant by a self-similarity of the harmonic map flow. We also study the singular set of such solutions as well as the uniqueness issue. This is a joint work with Tobias Lamm.