Continuous in time bubble decomposition for the harmonic map heat flow

Abstract

We consider the harmonic map heat flow for maps from the plane to the two-sphere. It is known that solutions to the initial value problem exhibit bubbling along a well-chosen sequence of times. We prove that every sequence of times admits a subsequence along which bubbling occurs. This is deduced as a corollary of our main theorem, which shows that the solution approaches the family of multi-bubble configurations in continuous time.