Regular 1-harmonic flow

Abstract

We consider the 1-harmonic flow of maps from a bounded domain into a submanifold of a Euclidean space, i.e. the gradient flow of the total variation functional restricted to maps taking values in the manifold. We restrict ourselves to Lipschitz initial data. We prove uniqueness and, in the case of a convex domain, local existence of solutions to the flow equations. If the target manifold has non-positive sectional curvature or in the case that the datum is small, solutions are shown to exist globally and to become constant in finite time. We also consider the case where the domain is a compact Riemannian manifold without boundary, solving the homotopy problem for 1-harmonic maps under some assumptions.