A sharp bound for the inscribed radius under mean curvature flow

Abstract

We consider a family of embedded, mean convex hypersurfaces which evolve by the mean curvature flow. It follows from general results of White that the inscribed radius at each point on the surface is at least $\frac{c}{H}$, where $c$ is a constant that depends only on the initial data. Andrews recently gave a new proof of that fact using a direct monotonicity argument. In this paper, we improve this result and show that the inscribed radius is at least $\frac{1}{(1+\delta) \, H}$ at each point where the curvature is large.