Hearing the shape of ancient noncollapsed flows in R4$\mathbb {R}^{4}$

Abstract

AbstractWe consider ancient noncollapsed mean curvature flows in whose tangent flow at is a bubble‐sheet. We carry out a fine spectral analysis for the bubble‐sheet function u that measures the deviation of the renormalized flow from the round cylinder and prove that for we have the fine asymptotics , where is a symmetric 2 × 2‐matrix whose eigenvalues are quantized to be either 0 or . This naturally breaks up the classification problem for general ancient noncollapsed flows in into three cases depending on the rank of Q. In the case , generalizing a prior result of Choi, Hershkovits and the second author, we prove that the flow is either a round shrinking cylinder or 2d‐bowl. In the case , under the additional assumption that the flow either splits off a line or is self‐similarly translating, as a consequence of recent work by Angenent, Brendle, Choi, Daskalopoulos, Hershkovits, Sesum and the second author we show that the flow must be 2d‐oval or belongs to the one‐parameter family of 3d oval‐bowls constructed by Hoffman‐Ilmanen‐Martin‐White, respectively. Finally, in the case we show that the flow is compact and SO(2)‐symmetric and for has the same sharp asymptotics as the O(2) × O(2)‐symmetric ancient ovals constructed by Hershkovits and the second author. The full classification problem will be addressed in subsequent papers based on the results of the present paper.