On the Convergence of the Elastic Flow in the Hyperbolic Plane

Abstract

We examine the L^2-gradient flow of Euler's elastic energy for closed curves in hyperbolic space and prove convergence to the global minimizer for initial curves with elastic energy bounded by 16. We show the sharpness of this bound by constructing a class of curves whose lengths blow up in infinite time. The convergence results follow from a constrained sharp Reilly-type inequality.