Diffusive stability and self-similar decay for the harmonic map heat flow

Abstract

In this paper we study the harmonic map heat flow on the euclidean space Rd and we show an unconditional uniqueness result for maps with small initial data in the homogeneous Besov space B˙p,∞dp(Rd) where d<p<∞. As a consequence we obtain decay rates for solutions of the harmonic map flow of the form ‖∇u(t)‖L∞(Rd)≤Ct−12.Additionally, under the assumption of a stronger spatial localization of the initial conditions, we show that the temporal decay happens in a self-similar way. We also explain that similar results hold for the biharmonic map heat flow and the semilinear heat equation with a power-type nonlinearity.