Weak solutions to gradient flows of functionals with inhomogeneous growth in metric spaces

Abstract

We use the framework of the first-order differential structure in metric measure spaces introduced by Gigli to define a notion of weak solutions to gradient flows of convex, lower semicontinuous and coercive functionals. We prove their existence and uniqueness and show that they are also variational solutions; in particular, this is an existence result for variational solutions. Then, we apply this technique in the case of a gradient flow of a functional with inhomogeneous growth.